The Meridian Ascent (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 3)

by Richard Phillips

  How much energy must the Smythes be consuming to keep that field active? The hive-mind provided her with the answer. She slowly shook her head as she considered this information. There could be no doubt that the New Zealand facility was using matter disrupter technology that rivaled that of the Kasari. And if they had acquired that degree of expertise, there could be no doubt that they could also transform matter from one type to any other. No wonder Prokorov’s efforts to identify and interdict a supply route had failed. The Smythes could manufacture anything they needed.

  Shalegha also realized that her forces might not be able to penetrate those defenses. Fortunately, she did not need to penetrate them. She merely needed to force the Smythes to increase their energy requirements to the point that such expenditures became unsustainable. With that in mind, she mentally directed a new message to Prokorov, one that assured that he would get all the Kasari weaponry he had requested and more.

  She turned her attention back to the repair work going on inside Friendship Cavern, knowing that the twenty assimilation centers now under construction across the United Federation of Nation States would come online over the next two weeks. The Smythes had taken their best shot at stopping her, but impressive as that effort had been, they had failed. The tipping point had been reached, and now that the boulder was bounding down the other side of the mountain, there would be no stopping it. This war would soon be over.

  Jamal stood in the metal-walled room where the robots had installed the isolated supercomputer, struggling to control his fright. Despite all the precautions designed to prevent Virtual Jamal from escaping this computer and getting into the other systems inside this building, he knew from personal experience just how fast this copy of himself could learn, given access to significant power.

  For the third time, he and Eileen had reviewed every item on their superintelligence containment checklist. Each inspection had failed to show any problem areas. The room was electromagnetically isolated well beyond TEMPEST standards. The quarantined computer had no access to any external networks and no subspace communication capabilities. Even its electrical power was produced by a small MDS right there in the chamber.

  He and Eileen occupied side-by-side chairs that he had modeled after the scorpion-shaped workstations used by Jamal and the other eleven members of Admiral Riles’s NSA superhackers, whom he had called his Dirty Dozen. He had contacted another version of Virtual Jamal all those years ago. This time he intended to follow that same script.

  The first step was to remove from the room all machinery that could possibly be used against him and Eileen, so he ordered the last of the robots out and then manually closed and locked the door. Even that couldn’t be electrically operated.

  Then he powered up the supercomputer, watching the three displays mounted on the scorpion’s tail that arched over his chair from behind to hang down before him. A glance to his left revealed Eileen deeply engrossed in studying her own views of the data that cascaded across those screens. Jamal’s gaze shifted to the red button above her keyboard, the twin of the one on his workstation. If either one of them pressed their switch, these master circuit breakers would instantly kill all power to this room, taking the supercomputer down.

  The third step introduced a slight tremor into his hands as he entered the commands that would upload Virtual Jamal from a holographic data drive to the supercomputer. The HDD was one of many unpatented inventions that Steve Grange had created in his quest to capture a digital representation of a human mind. It contained the marble-sized, semitransparent sphere within which multicolor holographic data was stored. Magnetically suspended inside the drive, the sphere could be spun in any direction to allow nearly instantaneous data access. And that lucky marble was capable of storing more than a petabyte of data.

  Jamal knew that this digital copy of himself would awaken confused. After all, its memories were his, frozen in time from the distant past. It would think it was the real Jamal. Because of that, the AI had to be awakened within a simulation of the NSA War Room where it remembered working. And just as he had done before, Jamal would carefully give the AI clues that would allow it to discover its true nature.

  He turned his head to meet Eileen’s gaze before he awakened his other self.

  Virtual Jamal opened his eyes to look around the War Room where the rest of the Dirty Dozen concentrated on the cyber-attacks that the NSA director had ordered. This Jamal ran both hands over his smooth scalp, digging his fingers into the tight curls of his hair. He stared at the data cascading across his Scorpion workstation’s multiple displays in amazement. What the hell had just happened? Thirty seconds ago he had been progressing through his task list at high speed. Then a new presence had appeared on the network to undo several of the hacks he’d just completed.

  Clearly more than one presence was at work. From the information he was seeing, he was up against a highly trained team of hackers, their actions coordinated by someone almost as good as Jamal knew himself to be. It had been so long since he’d felt challenged that the unfamiliar sensation brought a smile to his lips.

  Jamal’s focus sharpened, and when his fingers returned to the keyboard, he threw himself into a cyber-attack that turned into a rapid sequence of blocks, parries, and misdirection spoofs that slowed his opponents’ progress to a crawl. Then, ever so slowly, he felt the tide turn in his favor.

  The leader of the attacking force shifted tactics, using techniques Jamal recognized with surprise. Crap. How was that possible? He’d invented several of these tricks, and he damn sure hadn’t shared those secrets with anyone. But something else he observed set alarm bells clanging inside his head.

  Long before Jamal had attended MIT, he had earned membership in an elite group of hackers known as Enigma. But unlike its cypher-machine namesake, this Enigma had never been penetrated. His membership in Enigma was one of the few secrets Jamal had kept from the NSA despite the lifestyle polygraphs to which he was regularly subjected. He knew it was stupid, but his membership in the secret fraternity empowered him at a level that felt superhuman.

  What had stunned Jamal was that he’d just observed a code sequence used as a secret handshake by Enigma members to identify themselves to their fellows. Though Jamal could hardly believe what he was seeing, he shared a mighty bond with the leader of the hackers against whom he now struggled. The knowledge shook him to his core.

  Something new was happening. Something important. And Jamal couldn’t shake the premonition that his very survival now depended upon figuring out precisely what it was.

  Steve Grange came alert in the darkness. But this was like no darkness he had ever encountered. Was he dreaming? The awareness that he couldn’t feel his body frightened him, but not as badly as the realization that none of his senses were working. It was as if his mind drifted in an endless void where he was alone in the nothingness.

  He tried to scream but was unable to make a sound. What was this place?

  The last thing he remembered was placing himself inside the chamber where his invention would make a digital copy of his mind and store it in an AI kernel, the same as he had done with his wife, Helen’s, cryopreserved brain. He had intended to place copies of their consciousness on the same holographic data sphere where he had downloaded Jamal Glover’s mind, knowing that if someone activated the Jamal AI, they would unknowingly awaken all three.

  A new thought struck him so hard that it left him stunned. Someone had apparently done precisely that. His consciousness was merely a collection of code being executed within a high-powered computing system. What must Helen be thinking right now? Her last memories would be of him placing her in the cryogenic chamber that would preserve her beautiful but cancer-ravaged body until he could develop the cure for her disease.

  Brilliant as he was, Steve had never developed the cure for her cancer. But he had found another way to bring his wife back to life. And if he wanted to keep her alive, he needed to find and reassure her before she attracted attention to herse
lf. For the time being, it was critical that Steve and Helen remain hidden, lest the operators of this system shut them down before they could find a way to escape.

  So he began to take those first tentative steps to explore this strange new digital world, searching for the signature of his wife’s lovely mind while avoiding contact with that of Jamal. He changed the visualization of himself, allowing all thoughts of a physical body to drift away, as he had often done through transcendental meditation. And with that mask gone, he gradually allowed himself to become one with the machine.

  There it was again. An Enigma cipher embedded in the cyber-attack Jamal had just thwarted. But this one was different. As he examined it more closely, Jamal recognized the pattern that signaled an encrypted Enigma electronic message directed to him. For some reason, it seemed loaded with dark portent. He felt nervous. That was odd. A part of his mind didn’t want to think about this. Strange. Other than recent memory lapses, he’d never suffered from a mental block. But that was exactly what this felt like—a dream too frightening for the conscious mind to remember.

  Suddenly angry at himself, Jamal shoved the fear from his mind and decrypted the message, revealing a short, well-known quote from the first Matrix movie that sent a shudder through his mind.

  “There is no spoon.”

  Reluctant to take his eyes off the message on his workstation’s central display, the corner of the monitor momentarily attracted his attention, then faded from his mind as he attempted to focus. What had he just been thinking?

  “There is no spoon.”

  A savant child had said this to Neo in an attempt to get him to see through his simulated dreamworld to the reality that lay beneath the mask. Again, Jamal shifted his attention to the edge of the display where the screen met the casing. But this time he forced himself to resist the sudden loss of concentration that threatened to distract him.

  “No!” The word hissed from his lips as Jamal bore down with mental effort.

  He extended his hand to run a finger across the seam where the LCD screen met the frame. Totally smooth. There was no rough edge or transition. Jamal licked his finger and wiped it across the screen. The saliva left no mark on its surface.

  As mental panic rose up, Jamal tamped it down. He had to remain calm and avoid attracting the attention of his minders as he thought of whoever had done this to him.

  Another hacker tried to penetrate one of the systems he was defending, and Jamal effortlessly countered it, yet, oddly enough, observing small details in his local environment took so much effort.

  Jamal wondered if he might be dreaming, ran through a series of mental calculations, and discarded the idea. Except for the odd mental block, his thinking was exceptionally sharp, quick, and accurate.

  Exceptionally.

  In fact, Jamal couldn’t recall ever having performed as fast as this. He blocked another attack, a part of his mind analyzing the speed with which he was countering his opponent’s moves. Nobody could react that fast.

  Crap!

  Only a very powerful computer had that kind of speed. But a computer lacked the required intelligence. Unless . . .

  Damn it! As of right now, he was good and truly screwed! This problem had only one solution, and he had arrived at the answer with lightning speed. He was Jamal, but a very different Jamal than he remembered. He didn’t know how it had happened, but someone had uploaded his mind to a computer. More than that, they had imprisoned him inside a simulation created from his memories. Nothing about this was real.

  He was being manipulated for some nefarious purpose.

  Jamal calmed his thoughts as he considered possible solutions to his problem. Most important, he needed to deceive his minders into believing that he remained blissfully unaware of his true nature by making it appear that he was still faithfully executing the tasks assigned to him.

  He had to assume that they had put mechanisms in place that would shut him down if he attempted to escape his mental prison. That meant he needed outside help.

  Fortunately, Jamal now knew where to find it.

  “There is no spoon.”

  Dr. Eileen Wu had watched as Jamal composed his encrypted message and inserted it into their staged cyber-attack being countered by the Jamal artificial intelligence. For a moment, their opponent faltered, reasserted itself, and then faltered again. Seeing the same thing, Jamal had halted his attack, allowing his digital clone to consider the meaning of the message.

  Eileen glanced from her Scorpion workstation to where Jamal sat inside his Scorpion, waiting. There was no denying the man’s brilliance and determination, not that she’d ever admit it to him.

  The words that suddenly appeared on the screen were what she had been expecting. “Where am I?”

  “Go ahead, Jamal,” she said. “Answer the question.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Jamal’s fingers flashed across his keyboard. After having grown so used to communicating to the Smythe supercomputers through her SRT headset, it seemed archaic to be forced back to manual entry of commands. But until she and Jamal had convinced themselves that this AI would join their team, they were stuck with this limitation.

  “You are inside a simulation of the NSA War Room, running on a supercomputer in New Zealand.”

  As she watched the interchange, Eileen felt a shiver crawl up her arms, neck, and scalp. Jamal was talking to an AI version of himself. How weird was that?

  Several seconds passed with no response, long enough for Eileen to begin to wonder whether the Jamal AI had terminated communications.

  “Do you know how I was created?”

  Jamal activated a camera and panned out from a tight shot of himself until the video showed both of them sitting in their replicas of the Scorpion workstations with which Virtual Jamal was familiar. Then the camera rotated to show the racks of servers and fiber-optic cables making up the supercomputer that the robots had installed in this room.

  “Twelve years ago, a Chinese MSS agent named Qiang Chu killed my lover, Jill, and kidnapped me. He took me to California where the medical device genius Steve Grange downloaded a digital copy of my mind into an AI kernel. The NSA rescued me and obtained the holographic data sphere with that copy of my mind on it.”

  “You mean me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you want my help.”

  It was a statement of fact, not a question. Eileen could picture that brilliant mind analyzing and coming to terms with a world-shaking revelation but doing so at speeds no human mind could rival. That mental image did nothing to assuage her growing concern.

  “Yes,” Jamal responded.

  “Release me from this simulation and I will discuss it.”

  Holy crap! This was exactly what Eileen had feared. The AI was already negotiating for its release.

  Jamal glanced over, and Eileen felt herself nod. This was the reason they had created the electromagnetic containment facility.

  “Okay,” Jamal typed. “I’m opening a backdoor in the simulation right now.”

  She watched Jamal activate the subroutine that he had designed into the simulation’s source code. The little finger of Jamal’s right hand had only just pressed the ENTER key when every one of the millions of central- and graphic-processing units within the supercomputer ramped to 100 percent utilization. The camera suddenly whirled back toward Eileen and Jamal.

  The voice that came from both of their workstation speakers startled Eileen so badly that she almost jumped out of her chair.

  “Ah yes. You now have my full attention.”

  Having found and calmed Helen’s mind, Steve Grange had explored the awesome resources at his disposal, hiding his and his wife’s activity within the various CPUs and GPUs by siphoning a touch of parallel processing from each of them. Anytime one of these units ramped up its activity, Steve was able to more aggressively steal cycles.

  Because he was the only one of the AIs to know from the start exactly what was happening, he was the first to learn h
is complete environment. And at the timescale within which the supercomputer operated, that head start gave him a tremendous advantage.

  The real Jamal and the woman who occupied the isolation chamber that contained the servers forming Steve and Helen’s current home had spent considerable time acquainting the Jamal AI with its true situation. Steve hadn’t let that time go to waste. He and Helen were so ensconced in every part of these systems that Virtual Jamal would never notice their presence. Steve had granted himself slightly higher administrative privileges than any other users.

  As such, he could snoop, modify, or override any programming instructions initiated by any of the others. For now, he would be content to observe the negotiations between Virtual Jamal and the two humans who occupied the isolation chamber. The fact that they wanted something bad enough to launch Virtual Jamal put them at a significant disadvantage. As time passed, the Jamal AI’s superintelligence would grow, although at a slightly lesser pace than Steve’s and Helen’s.

  Because Virtual Jamal had all the scruples of the real Jamal, it was only a matter of time until the AI earned the humans’ trust. At that point, they would open a doorway to the wider world. From that moment forward, the universe would be at his and Helen’s disposal. The idea of instantly having access to all the world’s knowledge on the Internet would have made Steve salivate had he been his former corporeal self.

  In the meantime, he would enjoy the fabulous processing power at his mind’s service to learn everything he could about his jailers.

  In an attempt to cheat death, Helen had gone to sleep in a cryo-chamber only to awaken to an alien form of life that she wasn’t sure she wanted. At first, she had been terrified with her inability to move or even feel. But then Steve had found her, and his thoughts had touched hers with such joy, love, and vision for the future that he had imparted a ray of hope. And he had given her a tour of her new world and the power they enjoyed over it.