The Darwin Project

by John Hindmarsh

  The Darwin Project

  Annihilation Series: Book One

  John Hindmarsh

  Rexon Press

  Contents

  Series

  Newsletter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  About John

  Thrillers

  Science Fiction

  AI: Demon or Friend, the Beginning or the End?

  Annihilation

  A Thriller Series

  By

  John Hindmarsh

  Annihilation Series Structure

  Book One: The Darwin Project

  Book Two: Body Shop

  Book Three: Natural Born

  Book Four: I, President

  Copyright ©2017 John Hindmarsh

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the author.

  Disclaimer

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations, and incidents are entirely fictitious, invented by the author for the purpose of the story. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, business establishments, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover

  Cover Design by Stuart Bache

  www.bookscovered.co.uk

  Editing

  This book was copy edited by Sasha Paulsen.

  Any errors were introduced by the writer.

  Sometimes British terminology or spelling somehow finds its way into the story; that’s because I’m Australian.

  Dedication

  I want to thank my wife Cathy for her continuing patience, for providing her utmost support, and finally for re-reading many drafts.

  This book is for Cathy.

  Newsletter

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  Reviews

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  Chapter One

  The huge counter-weighted, stainless steel door swung outwards, slowly, silently, exposing a medium-sized room that appeared to be carved from a block of solid steel. Overhead lights, all low-power LEDs, switched on automatically. There were no windows, no other exits. The mirror-like finish of the walls, floor, and ceiling warped the reflections of the man standing just outside the doorway.

  Nathan Travers stepped into the room and turned to a small keypad set in the wall beside the single entrance. He entered a code, repeating it twice for validation, and the huge door began its return trip. It would take thirty seconds to close, and he waited for the slight clunk that would announce the seal was complete. The security process controlling the door required his DNA and an extensive series of passwords before it would unlock, a time-consuming process if ever it was needed.

  For now, he was locked inside the steel chamber.

  Nathan counted; this would be trip number ten. He wondered briefly whether there was a limit to the number of times he should undertake these trips.

  He shrugged.

  Time would tell.

  He was an inch under six feet and had a slim, fit build. He wore an anonymous polo shirt with well-washed, faded jeans and Reeboks. His attire would not appear out of place at any time in recent years. His hair, graying, was cut short in an intended timeless style. He was in his early fifties, although deep lines of inexplicable weariness belied his age.

  He carried a large, heavy backpack, brown with black flaps and straps.

  He was alone in the room. The cold blue finish of his steel environment created a hallucinatory depthless effect. Temperature-controlled air was flowing from a nearby vent at two or three degrees below his comfort level. A barely-used, large wooden desk stood almost in the center of the room. A black Aero chair was waiting beside the desk.

  The desk supported three workstations connected to a single monitor. The equipment showed its age, and again he made a mental note to consider its replacement. The workstations were connected to an adjacent external storage array configured to RAID 0+1. Heavy network and power cables, insulated against disruptive radiation and other external influences, connected to each workstation and flowed down and disappeared into holes drilled into the steel floor. The network cables led to other processing units, external to the steel room, via cutouts and circuitous routes intended to prevent anyone tracing the links back to these workstations.

  Other equipment, its purpose not obvious, stood in the corner to Nathan’s right. Part of this was a vertical cylinder with a curved sliding door. The cylinder, with its bottom, top, and sliding door covered in heavyweight, braided steel mesh, formed a man-sized Faraday cage.

  Racked shelving beside the Faraday cage held more processing units plus a small monitor. A basic keyboard, located inside the cage, was connected to the first of the rack-mounted processing units. The monitor display was visible from inside the cage. A large, doorless cabinet, its shelves filled with more electronic equipment, was located on the other side of the cage. Its contents produced a soft, low-frequency hum, felt more than heard. Sequences of flashing green and amber lights indicated it also contained arrays of processors. Heavy power supply cables pushed up from holes in the steel floor and disappeared into the cabinet, and other cables connected it and the base of the Faraday cage.

  Nathan had checked the four sets of identical power supplies, each housed either in adjacent secure rooms or, in the case of externally sourced power, routed indirectly to this room. The power units supplied trickle-fed capacitor constructs that guaranteed uninterrupted power consistency for the intended intensive operation of the equipment.

  Small amounts of dust had accumulated in the room and, disturbed by his movements as he walked to the desk, caused him to sneeze. This happened every time he visited. He cursed softly. Again, he had not thought to arrange additional filtering in the ventilation system. For the tenth time, he wondered how a sealed room with a filtered air supply could gather so much dust. It seemed to increase with each visit, which was its own paradox.

  Nathan sneezed again.

  He placed his backpack on the desk and carefully removed a RAID device complete with disks, identical to the storage structure currently connected to the workstations. The net data capacity of each disk was four terabytes and the array was capable of storing twenty terabytes in total, striped across two sets of mirrored disks. He placed the backpack on the floor, aware of its other precious contents, not least of which was a package containing just under a thousand flawless-graded dia
monds, each between two and three carats. They were required to further fund his activities.

  Nathan switched on the monitor at the desk. At the prompt, he keyed in his username and password. He then entered responses to a series of security questions. After almost a minute, the monitor displayed a diagram reflecting connections to each workstation and thence to the existing storage unit. Nathan entered a series of short commands at a blinking command-line cursor at the bottom of the screen. The display reset, showing new data, and he checked the results.

  Satisfied, Nathan entered commands to suspend the workstations’ links to the current RAID device, switched off its power supply, and disconnected the cables and power input. He moved the unit to one side, out of his way. He placed the new data storage unit in position and reconnected the cables and the power supply. He switched it on and watched as the new hardware booted up. Comforted by the implied results indicated by a row of green lights across the front of the new storage unit, he lifted the superseded device from the desk and, with care, placed it in his backpack. It contained data that he would compare with the baseline provided by the previous nine units.

  The comparison was to determine whether his trips so far had caused any measurable variations in events the equipment was recording, variations that could mean this was the last trip he would make.

  Nathan sat at the monitor and ran a set of disk-checking procedures, intently examining and evaluating the results. Finally, certain of the correct functioning of the newly installed storage unit, he logged out, terminating the monitor’s display of links to the three workstations. He switched off the monitor.

  He stood up and stretched, relieved that his efforts had been successful.

  The process had failed once before. The remedial steps had required time-consuming re-connection of the original storage unit and a repeat of the disk-validation process, followed by replacement of the new disks. Nathan now ensured he had fully tested the new hardware before he entered the room, as well as after he had connected it to the workstations.

  Nathan lifted his backpack into position, ignoring the heavy weight settling onto his shoulders. He walked over to the Faraday cage. He stopped at the racked workstation and, reaching inside the cage to the small keyboard, entered instructions. LEDs on the cabinet-based equipment turned from amber to green. He verified each green light as the system self-validated. He stepped into the Faraday cage and stood on the small metal platform. He closed the sliding door, entered a short command, and hit the return key on the keyboard.

  The monitoring equipment indicator lights blinked as power surged. The large cabinet generated a mixed range of sounds, the sonic mix ascending from its initial almost inaudible level to a nerve-wrenching series of shrieks, as though protesting against the intentions of the man standing on the platform. Then, without notice, the sound stopped.

  The silence was sudden, complete, deafening.

  Small lightning chains spread across the exterior of the Faraday cage, crackling their fury. The odor of ozone penetrated the metal mesh.

  Nathan did not move.

  After another twenty seconds, in a series of flickers, he began to slowly disappear.

  Almost in counterpoint to his own status, an outline of another person, an unexpected intruder, flickered its appearance some two to three feet away from the Faraday cage. That’s impossible, Nathan thought.

  The intruder was dressed as a clown with a fluffy blond wig. His face was white, and he wore a large red nose.

  Nathan reached towards the escape key on the keyboard and almost abended the process. Terminating the transfer at this point was a step he had never tested. He halted his movement, deciding this was not the time to begin such a test.

  For the next ten seconds, each visible sequence of Nathan’s existence in the sealed room grew shorter and fainter until, at last, he disappeared. His departing sneeze echoed around the supposedly empty room.

  The clown figure was now fully visible in the small room; that is, if anyone had been there to see him. He examined the workstations, watched, for a moment, the flickering green lights on the RAID unit, and then he, too, disappeared.

  After a short period, the LEDs switched off.

  The room would sit for another fifteen years or for a month or so—in this room, effectively, there was no difference—before it was again to be visited by the man with the backpack.

  Whether the clown would return was not yet known.

  oOo

  Chapter Two

  Toby McIntosh reread the attorney’s letter that had been delivered two minutes prior by an ebike courier. The courier had apologized when she handed over the envelope—she blamed traffic delays. Toby cursed. He muttered an excuse to the graduate student who was waiting for his semester review and rushed out of his office. He checked his watch as he headed to the elevator bank.

  Someone—according to the letter, it would be a chauffeur driving a black Tesla—would be waiting for him in the no parking zone in front of the building. Based on the scheduled arrival time of the vehicle, Toby was now late.

  He was on the eighth floor of an off-campus Caltech faculty building in Los Angeles and normally, to support his fitness regime, he would run down the stairs. The elevator bank was closer, and typically the elevators were quicker, unless the journey coincided with a rush of undergrad students. Then, chaos ensued, in either case, as groups of noisy students rushed up and down the stairwell or lined up to catch one of the four elevators, of which often three would be out of service, their status apparently due to a funding issue of some kind.

  He was fortunate; there were no crowds of students when he reached the elevators. Even more fortuitous, an elevator car was waiting, ready, its doors not yet closing. He rushed into the car, pressed the ground floor button, sighed his relief when he checked the elevator’s direction of travel—it was downward—and relaxed.

  Four minutes later, he exited onto the street and stood beside the no-parking zone. It was empty of vehicles. A homeless veteran approached from the side of the building, pushing himself on a slide-along. The man had no legs, and his right arm was artificial, ending in metal claws. Tiny metal wires embedded in his skull showed faintly under his skin. He had sergeant’s chevrons on his jacket sleeve. The man held out a metal cup. Toby dug into his wallet, extracted a twenty-dollar bill and pushed it into the receptacle. He thought the man was probably a survivor of one of DARPA’s more extreme experiments and the injuries were from the Army’s failed venture in Iran.

  The vet nodded. “Thanks, Doc. Remember, we have your back. These guys are frauds.” He glanced out at the road.

  As Toby looked around, a black Suburban screeched to a halt, and two men jumped out. The vet pushed himself away. The new arrivals were suits. At least, he thought, they weren’t brownshirts—the president’s militia members were still uncommon in California. One of the men flipped an ID badge as he approached Toby. The maneuver was quick and practiced; there was no opportunity to verify the man’s identity. The other suit had a photograph in his left hand and was checking it as he moved forward.

  Toby had commenced an AR video when he exited the AI-Robotics faculty building and was recording everything within his vision. When the Suburban pulled up, he had given a sub-vocal command, and the video began to stream to his vblog. When the man flipped his badge, Toby sent a text alert to all his subscribers. Within seconds, his audience would total perhaps two hundred thousand or more worldwide; it still intrigued him how many people were entertained by his transmissions. He was capturing sound as well as image, and he thought this broadcast would intrigue his viewers.

  “The photo checks,” the second man said to his companion. He returned the photograph to his pocket and flashed his ID at Toby.

  “Old-fashioned,” Toby thought, adjusting his glasses. Augmented reality was far better than a hard-copy image.

  The nearest man, the one who had first flipped his ID wallet, said, “FBI. I’m Agent Raines. This is Agent Lilley. Get in
the vehicle.” He indicated the open rear door.

  Toby stood firm. “Sorry, guys. I’m waiting for someone. Besides, you don’t have a warrant for my arrest. I know, because I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Smart ass. How about interfering with a terrorist investigation?” Raines grabbed Toby’s arm and pressured him towards the vehicle.

  Toby resisted, snapping his arm away from the self-identified FBI agent. He aggressively worked out and was, he thought, probably way fitter than Agent Raines, who appeared to be donut-driven overweight.

  “We can add resisting arrest,” suggested the other agent. He’d drawn a weapon, his general mien threatening.

  Toby looked the second agent up and down. He held focus for a moment on the weapon in the agent’s hand and widened the image to capture both men and the Suburban. He flashed the vehicle’s license number to a corner of the image.

  Raines was tall and thin, and his deodorant was flower fragrant and strong. Toby tried not to breathe. He issued another sub-vocal command and inserted a caption into the streaming video. He stepped back onto the pavement and raised his hand.

  “Stop—I’m recording all of this and streaming it live. My vblog counter shows there are over two hundred thousand people watching right now. About one hundred and fifty thousand here in LA and, in minutes, there’ll be far more across the country, according to Google metrics. You’ll soon be famous, worldwide. The audience will double in the next five minutes. People like to share my videos.” He focused on each man in turn; ensuring the camera in his glasses captured clear facial images.

  He addressed the man who had introduced himself as Agent Raines. “You accosted me, grabbed my arm, and tried to force me into your vehicle for no apparent reason. I think the ID you flashed was as genuine as the alt-right’s sympathy for the sick and the poor. How about you leave, before you’re totally embarrassed? Your choice.”