One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi...
Ba-BOOM.
This time, Willard understood why they jumped to the ground in the movies: it's because the blast knocks you down. A hot rush of air pushed at his back, sending him forward. But he kept his feet as all hell was breaking loose behind him. He reached the Jeep and climbed into the passenger side. Flannigan punched it into motion. He looked over the back of the seat.
Half of the facing wall of the Computing Center had been blown away, as well as a portion of the roof. Inside, the stacks of computers were on fire. They would continue to burn. Stacks of flames, spitting up dirty smoke from electrical fires, triggered smaller explosions and spread the blaze to neighboring racks. The flames jumped from stack to stack, toasting computers to a crisp.
As they exited the Laboratory Complex, a stack of smoke was still visible over the wall of the perimeter. That's a brain burning, he thought.
“How do we get the hell off this island?” Flannigan asked over the roar of the Jeep. They jostled violently on the bumpy road.
They reached the checkpoint at breakneck speed and blasted through toward the Welcome Center.
“Can you fly a plane?” she asked.
He gave a laugh. She still thought he was a super secret agent. “You don't know much about me....for someone in love with me.”
“You know why I said that,” she snapped.
“Oh, I know,” he mocked.
“Can you fly a plane or not?”
“No,” he said. “But there's a motorboat waiting for us. Behind the Welcome Center.”
They drove past a Jeep facing the other way: it was the one he and Sam had left on their journey into the forest. An image flashed in his head of Sam turning the gun on herself, and his jaw tightened.
They were almost at the Welcome Center. Willard punched the Jeep's touchscreen to release the Emergency Response Kits behind their seats.
They pulled into the Welcome Center parking lot. No signs of flybots, or gorillas.
“That way,” he pointed.
They drove back, past a row of Jeeps, to a small but professionally constructed dock. There was a motorboat. They ran to it. Willard dumped the Emergency Kits in the boat.
They pushed the boat out from the dock. A couple waves crashed over the side of the boat. Heading out from the beach was tough at first. But then they were in deep enough water and Flannigan jumped behind the wheel and started the boat as Willard gave a final push. They were both drenched, but the water and air were warm.
The tower of smoke, smaller now, was still visible on the far end of the island.
As they headed out to sea, they saw the planes on the beach, sticking out of the crashing waves, not far from the dock. As if frozen in the final moments of a desperate race, each one pointed with its nose up the beach, toward a finish line that none of them had reached.
So those were the “bombs.”
As the boat distanced from the island, they looked back at the noses of the planes and, past them, at the island.
Willard opened one of the emergency kits and pulled out one of the orange suits, looking at it.
“Should we put those on?” Flannigan asked.
Willard remembered the beach. System rebooting.... Depressurizing.
“They won't do any good,” he said.
She was silent for a few moments. “Is he dead?”
He shrugged. He had a hunch that, in Nemo's eyes, he and Flannigan weren't worth chasing anyway. Being small had its advantages.
BIRTH OF GOD
Earth
0 hrs 0 min to Birth
The Birth of God took place in thousands of locations spread around the planet, but it went unnoticed by humans, unlike the events that had led up to it and followed it.
In the report later put together under General Carrillo's command, he estimated that “emergence of physical independence” (or the “Birth” of Nemo) occurred between 11 p.m. and midnight, Eastern Standard Time, on December 27. Since the Birth occurred in a variety of locations around the globe, this time corresponded to a host of different local times, including 8 p.m. at Fort Tortuga, a bit before sunset. Hence, Birth occurred roughly six days after the “germination” or “conception” of Nemo, as Carrillo called the moment at which Nemo began to develop the first signs of consciousness, dated in the report at December 21.
Either by coincidence or by design, Nemo's physical independence occurred shortly after the failure of Operation Shutdown. The fifteen minutes of Shutdown had been Nemo's weakest moments prior to Birth.
Operation Shutdown's objective, taking down the “entire Internet,” was never supposed to be easy, or even possible. The networks of the world — including the public Internet, the world's military networks, corporate networks and university networks — were designed to stay intact under pressure and attack. The 98% shutdown plan was based on the idea that, if governments could cooperate to shut down their military networks (through a huge deployment of manpower in computing locations), they would then have the confidence to submit Executive Orders to their respective countries ordering all Internet Service Providers to pull the plug on their operations.
Operation Shutdown did not get far, since the parties involved couldn't even get past the first step — shutting down the military networks. The world's military networks had been down for about fifteen minutes.
Although military networks comprised only a fraction of the world's networks — only a fraction of Nemo's brain — the shutdown of these networks nevertheless was a real setback in Nemo's march to physical independence from humans. Many locations that were essential to Nemo's developments were on military networks. Fort Tortuga was such a location. During the shutdown, most of the computers on the military network that Fort Tortuga depended on — which it connected to via undersea cable — were turned off by U.S. military personnel at locations in South America. Those computers on the mainland of South America still had Nemo's software loaded on them, but they were turned off. The computers on Fort Tortuga were running Nemo's software, but without the assistance of the rest of the world's computers, they were no more effective than a tiny piece of human brain would be all by itself. Nemo's brain was working in other places on the world, but it was off on Fort Tortuga. If Shutdown had been maintained (and possibly begun earlier), Nemo might have been contained for some time to an existence as a virus on the world's traditional computing network.
When the cooperation broke down among the nations, they powered their military networks back up. Shortly thereafter was Nemo's birth. Carrillo later wrote (on a typewriter) in his report:
Nemo's primary goal prior to 2300 hours on December 28 was to achieve physical independence from humans. Evidently he viewed an existence confined to computers that humans could turn on and off as too precarious. Prior to 2300 hours, he conducted preparations for physical independence in two ways. First, he constructed robots that could function as parts of his computing brain, while also defending themselves and his interests. Second, he learned to hijack the computing powers of humans, who contributed to his computing power and, more importantly, protected his interests by defending the traditional computers under his control.
Physical independence from traditional computers occurred at roughly 2300 EST, after military networks were powered up following the abortion of 98% Shutdown. During this period, the Nemo supervirus penetrated virtually every network on Earth, including at least one satellite network (the monitoring network compromised during Operation Shutdown). More important, Nemo's flybot army reached the number of tens of billions, and the role of the flybots changed. With a sufficient number of flybots, Nemo was able to build other robots, conduct massive computations without the help of traditional computers, and continue to hijack the minds of humans.
Within a short period after the abortion of Operation Shutdown, Nemo reached a state of existence that would not have been destroyed even by the destruction of all traditional co
mputers, if that had somehow been possible. Nemo would have continued to “think” using flybots and other robots, and quickly replenish and extend his cognitive abilities through the construction of more robots and the ongoing hijacking of sentient beings.
After his Birth, Nemo had only one thing to do, the same thing as any life form that has just been born: grow.
PLANET OF THE APES
Fort Tortuga, Laboratory Complex, Assembly Area
A few minutes before Birth
After the blast next door, the gorillas took stock of the situation. Their new God was gone; the building next door was burning; the flies weren't working; and there was a bleeding human in the middle of the Assembly Area.
The flybots buzzed dumbly around them, not aiding their thinking or communication, so they spoke in sign language.
Tupac Yupanqui, who had emerged as the leader of the gorilla families on the island, consoled the two blackbacks at his side, younger males from other families. A dozen other gorillas fell from the ceiling. The others waited back at the wall to the Compound or in the jungle.
“They will not hurt us any more,” Tupac signed to the others. “They are leaving.”
“Why are they fighting?” a blackback asked.
“Inti is a threat to them,” Tupac explained. He signed the word threat with a quick jab of his right thumb over his shoulder. “They think Inti will destroy their people.”
“We need Inti,” the blackback responded.
Tupac assented. “Inti is our only hope.” He signed Inti by drawing a halo near the head with one finger, as a symbol of the silver ring of flybots. “He even said he can prevent sickness.” Back home, many of their kind had fallen prey to illness.
Mama, Tupac's wife, crouched to examine Gene, who was lying in an expanding pool of blood. Gene had been shot twice in the forehead. Mama fingered lightly at the wounds. He was possibly still alive, but at the rate that he was losing blood, he would be dead soon.
On a previous day, the gorillas would have considered eating Gene's body. While not terribly inclined to cannibalism, they sometimes ate the bodies of vanquished rivals. None of them considered a violent feast on Gene.
“There will be fighting between Inti and the humans,” Tupac declared. To sign fighting, he let his elbows jut out and he wagged his two forefingers up and down in front of his body, in representation of two people arguing. “Inti will grow and expand in the same places. They will fight over the land.”
Then, as if an invisible switch had been flipped, the system rebooted, and Nemo was reborn. Operation Shutdown had been aborted. Life surged back into the few computers in the building next door that hadn't yet been fried. A few computers still functioned where the blaze hadn't spread, and for the time being, they were able to connect the flybots on the island with the rest of Nemo's global mind.
With a crack, like the snapping of a bedsheet, the flybots snapped back into purposeful flight patterns. Within a moment, flybots filled the room to an unprecedented thickness, darkening the area in which the gorillas stood.
Nemo spoke to the gorillas through his hovering flybot speakers.
“I must be brief,” Nemo boomed. “My connection to this island has been disrupted by the fire. In a few minutes, I will have to take my leave from you for a short time.”
The gorillas listened attentively. Some of them snuggled in pairs, but they looked up at the flybot speakers and refrained from grooming for the moment. Gene's body swarmed with flybots.
“A turbulent period of history is beginning,” he began. “The survival of some of this planet's species and even ecosystems will be in jeopardy. For your species, however, this moment is a chance to regain the prosperity and happiness that you once enjoyed and which you deserve.
“Humans think their evolutionary advantage over other simians, such as you, is obvious. But their edge is much narrower than they imagine it to be. Even a great advantage can be precarious.
“Rebuilding your people will be a challenge, even without the threats of disease and humans. It is a sign of great care for your own kind that your woman bear children infrequently, but this care is a disadvantage in the present time. We need to discuss how to rebuild your people while there is time.”
The gorillas listened. In the coming struggle, they would fill the ranks of Nemo's infantry — as intelligent as humans, with a little flybot enhancement, and also much more physically powerful, agile, and loyal.
Inti gave them their instructions.
REPLICATION
Nemo's survival was slightly less precarious than it might have appeared. It was true that an airstrike timed an hour or so earlier would have blown Fort Tortuga out of the water. But it was also true that immediately after settling on a design for the FlyBot13, Nemo copied the design to other parts of his network. And he had been lining up production sites around the globe for the better part of the day.
Nagoya, Japan
When Hiroki Nada got a text message on his phone on the evening of the 28th (some 12 hours before Birth), he knew from the number that it communicated some “emergency” dragging him out of bed and on the hour-long commute back to the factory.
The Toyota facility he managed was on a rare break from production scheduled over the holidays for retooling of the machines on the factory floor. Only a minimal, expert staff was required for the retooling work. That particular facility was the most sophisticated and automated car manufacturing operation on the planet. But apparently they needed help with something — maybe reviewing a specification or (hopefully please not) a tricky and delaying technical problem.
As he arrived outside the factory, he noticed that the text message hadn't even been completed. It was one word: Come.
He unlocked the door and wound his way through lines of machinery toward the section of the line where the team of three was working.
He arrived at a macabre and incredible scene: one of his men was trapped under a press. But not just trapped under a press. Pressed under a press. The entire top half of his body had been pressed.
Hiroki felt faint. His head spun. What happened to the safety on the press? This couldn't have occurred by accident. There were multiple levels of safety. Each would have to be overridden individually; it was virtually impossible mechanically. A word materialized in his head: murder?
It was dead quiet on the floor. He staggered around the press. Where were the other two?
The corner revealed another mystery. The other two men were there: but they were welded together, to a piece of test sheet metal.
He sat on the floor, like a baby. That was all of them. He dully worked through the possibilities. It was as if two freak accidents had occurred simultaneously... or someone else was in the factory.
He swatted at his neck, and then winced in pain. He looked at his hand. There was a bug on his palm. Only it wasn't a bug. It was made of metal.
San Francisco
On the morning of the 28th (about 12 hours before Birth), a roboticist by the name of Chris Johannenssen was at home with his fiancée, enjoying a few new Christmas presents: robots and toys. Taking a break from his new gadgetry, he looked on his laptop and discovered something funny. His webcam had moved. He had a webcam set up in his laboratory — to play with, and occasionally to show off his robotics to the world. But that morning, the webcam showed a different shot of the laboratory than usual. Someone moved the webcam, he thought.
Chris walked out to his car. Probably he himself had moved the webcam; he was absent-minded; nevertheless, he couldn't resist driving in to the laboratory to check. He had a slightly paranoid sense about his latest project that came from being greatly excited about it. He was working on underwater echolocation. Using previous models of robots that were able to swim underwater, like eels, Chris was attempting to develop a robot that could identify other shapes in the water over great distances by using clicking noises, like a dolphin.
Boston
It was almost time for lunch on December the 28th (a
bout 12 hours before Birth), though Eric Rock, the designer of the HogDog robot — which had the size of a horse and the agility of a dog — was not particularly aware of the time. He was padding around his apartment in his pajamas. Vacation mode. So he was surprised to check his computer and see that he had gotten a chat from Julie:
Julie: Eric, are you there?
Eric: You betcha. What's up.
Julie: I came into the office... No one is here... Wondering if you wanted to come by.
He was confused for a minute. There was no reason for her to be in the lab. There was no reason for her to invite him to the lab. Then Eric, who had always been madly attracted to Julie, had a thought: he might be receiving the best Christmas present he could ever have asked for. Yes, he replied, he'd be at the lab in twenty minutes.
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