The Jennifer Project

by Larry Enright

  “Can it, Paul,” said Dave.

  “You may the crew leader, Dave, but you’re not the boss. Don’t push it.”

  “Just shut up.”

  “How do you communicate with the others if you’re not on the grid?” asked Katherine.

  “Each cell has an old army Sat-scrambler that’s hooked into the few satellites we still control,” Dave said. “That’s how we pirate OmniNet, TV, and do long-range communications. It’s totally untraceable. We use all low-power walkie-talkies for local chatter in case the Jens do a flyby.”

  “Where do you get your food?”

  “We work a farm in a valley nearby.”

  “We call it the Hidden Valley Farm,” Paul chimed in. “Want to know why?”

  “Let me guess,” said Katherine. “Because it’s in a hidden valley?”

  “Damn, she’s smart, too.”

  “In case you’re wondering,” said Dave, “Paul’s not too bright.”

  “But he’s a pretty good shot, isn’t he?” Katherine said.

  “I could give you a few pointers if you like,” said Paul. “You know, private pointers?”

  “In your dreams,” she said.

  “You got that right, little lady.”

  Dr. Crane looked down at Deever and began to sob.

  “I’m really sorry about this, ma’am,” said Dave. “We thought sure he had a Two on him.”

  “Is this how you treat everyone who wears one?” she said.

  “Only the ones who get this close.”

  “You just better hope he pulls through this,” said Katherine.

  The truck stopped at the end of a winding dirt road blocked by two metal doors covered with camouflage netting, making them undetectable from the air. Dave radioed the pass phrase to his companions inside. The netting parted, the doors opened, and we drove into the cave. Inside the dimly lit area were a paved parking lot and a guard station. Beside the station was tramcar that, according to the facility blueprints, ran on a network of tracks connecting the atrium through a series of concrete-reinforced tunnels to the other parts of the facility.

  “Go find Doc,” Dave said to Matt. “Tell him to meet us in the infirmary, and tell that guard to close the damned doors.” As Matt trotted off, Dave called after him, “And get Sparks out here with his head detector. Pronto.”

  The reinforced metal doors closed and locked. Built during a forgotten era in human history called the Cold War, they were designed to withstand a one-kiloton thermonuclear blast. At the time, they were considered impenetrable from the outside. The facility’s architects had apparently envisioned the enemy intending to destroy the country’s birth records, financial documents, and historical information as a means of defeating them. I find it curious how humans think. They loaded Deever onto the tram and we waited.

  “Why aren’t we moving?” asked Dr. Crane.

  “Boss’s orders. No one goes anywhere until Sparks checks them out,” Dave replied.

  “You already checked us out. Please.”

  “Sparks will be here soon enough with his magic wand. We go when he says you’re OK. If he doesn’t? Well, that’s another story.”

  The one named Sparks appeared from a side tunnel. He was overly thin for the species, wore thick glasses, and fidgeted constantly. Of course, I was in no position to make an exact diagnosis of his condition, but suffice it to say he would have benefited greatly from the advice of a Jennifer-2. The device he was carrying as he walked into the atrium was a scanner, but different than the one used on us at the village. Jimmy shuffled over to him and tugged on his sleeve.

  “Hey there, little fellow,” Sparks said, giving the chimp a friendly pat on the head.

  Jimmy grabbed the scanner and ran off. Sparks chased him down and after some coaxing got him to give it back. As I suspected, the device was a sophisticated military-grade scanner that had been modified to detect even the shortest wavelengths at the highest end of the electromagnetic spectrum, including the trace amounts of gamma rays emitted by the radioactive decay of Undutresium. The Resistance had done its homework on the Jennifer Project.

  Sparks scanned us, then pointed to Deever and Katherine. “Well, except that their Bios are busted, these two seem normal. I’m not picking up any Jen-Tech in them at all. But that one,” and he nodded toward Dr. Crane, “that one’s a different story.”

  “How so?” Dave asked.

  “Her Biocard’s definitely not transmitting on any radio frequency, that’s for sure, but the electromagnetics are way off. That sucker’s got Undutresium in it, and there’s Jen-Tech in there all right. Never seen anything like it in a Biocard. It must be some kind of new hybrid design that we haven’t come across yet.”

  “Is it a security risk?”

  “I don’t know, Dave. There’s no way in hell that whatever she’s got inside her skull can give us away underneath all the lead in this mountain, but I’d sure like to know more about it before I give my OK.”

  Dave turned to Dr. Crane. “Is that why you were running?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “There’s two ways this can go, ma’am. Either you come clean or we let your friend die right here.”

  “I’m no threat to you,” she said.

  “I’ll be the judge of that. Now start talking.”

  “My Biocard is a medical implant. It’s based on the Jennifer technology, I admit that, but its only function is to overcome a condition I have.”

  “Yeah, and what’s that?”

  “She was given an illegal mind control drug by Pan-Robotics,” said Katherine. “They were killing her to get her to help them. Now they want her back. Him, too. That’s why we’re running.”

  “Did you help them make it?” Dave asked Dr. Crane.

  She looked down at Deever, lying unconscious on the stretcher. “No. He did.”

  “Whoa. Hang onto your undies everyone,” said Sparks. “I’ve isolated a second reading. What the hell? It’s coming from the monkey. It’s another of those Jen-Tech Biocards, Dave. Zero transmissions, but the same electromagnetic signature as the lady there. What the hell’s a monkey doing with an Undutresium Biocard?”

  Dave nodded to Paul, and they raised their weapons. “OK. Which one of you wants to tell me what the hell’s really going on here?” he demanded.

  “Jimmy was the test case for my implant,” Dr. Crane replied. “He had terminal brain cancer. The Jennifer Biocard saved him, too. Please, you need to do something now. Deever is dying.”

  “Wait a sec,” said Sparks. “Did you just call him Deever?”

  “That’s right,” Dr. Crane replied.

  “As in Deever MacClendon, the sorry sack of shit who’s to blame for all this?”

  She lowered her head. “Yes.”

  “Holy shit,” said Dave. “Get the boss, Paul. Tell him to meet us in the infirmary. Now.”

  Chapter 22

  The man the Resistance called boss, the man who led the last of the uncontrolled humans against Pan-Robotics, was none other than Frederick James, only son of Kerlin James. The younger James had escaped from the city and gone into hiding some years before upon discovering his father’s perverted scheme to prolong his own life by taking his son’s heart in transplant. His desperate father’s efforts to locate him eventually forced Frederick to remove his Biocard, abandon civilization entirely, and flee into the mountains. There he would have remained until his father’s passing, but upon learning the true nature of his father’s plan to control every human on Earth he changed from fugitive to sworn enemy and leader of the Resistance. They were free humanity’s last hope, doing everything they could to stop the Jennifer Project. Frederick James explained all this as he stood before us watching Dr. Martin treat Deever.

  “We started by kidnapping important people and removing their Twos, putting fake ones in their place,” he said. “We had actually taken control back of the governments of several cities, a few in Europe, and one or two in Asia. Then the tech got smarter. Somehow i
t discovered which ones were the fakes, and tracked them back and assimilated everyone again. Sparks here figured it out. They were using the Biocard database, the one that was supposedly hack-proof. That’s when we started removing everyone’s chips. That’s when we dropped off the grid entirely. Now we’re fighting a guerilla war.”

  Frederick James was an older man. His appearance and mannerisms were very much like his father’s. Yet despite being cut from the same genetic cloth, they were very different people with opposite goals and antithetical moral structures. Perhaps that was due to the mix of maternal genes in Frederick’s makeup, or perhaps it was due to environmental determinism and behavioral conditioning. It would make for an interesting comparative study someday.

  “But it’s a war we’re losing,” he continued. “As fast as we hit their factories, they rebuild them. For every comm tower and power plant we take out, it seems like they put up two more. We disrupt supply lines and they reroute from another source. We sabotage Protectorbots, and they send an army of new ones to replace them. We free ten men, and they capture twenty more. It’s a hell of a mess. Every op we lose men, and when they’re captured they become Jens. All it takes is one. When that one is turned, everything they know is known by the enemy, and whichever one of our cells they were stationed at goes dark. Now, we’ve switched tactics. Information is compartmentalized. Only the cell leaders know the overall plans. Now we have alternate safe locations to go to when we lose a man, but we’re down to only a handful of active cells and our numbers are dwindling. I’d just about given up hope.” He pointed to Deever. “Now, we’ve got a fighting chance again. He’s the only one on Earth who can stop this. With what he knows, we can bring down the Jennifer Project and put an end to this nightmare.”

  “What he knows won’t do you a damn bit of good if he dies,” said Katherine.

  Frederick James was clearly the passionate sort, and he reacted in a manner that humans often refer to as exploding. “Don’t you think I know that? Damn it. Do you have any idea what it’s like to try to fight this thing?”

  “You can’t,” said Katherine, “at least not alone. That’s why Deever was looking for you. He wanted to help you.”

  “Him? Help us? He created this.”

  “He knew he’d screwed up. They tricked him, and he was trying to fix it.”

  “And we’re supposed to believe that?” said Dave.

  “Believe what you want. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “How’d you know where to look for us?” Dave continued.

  “We didn’t. You found us, remember?”

  “Yeah, but why’d you come to the village?”

  “We thought we could hide out there for a while.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “It was off the grid. It was safe. But like I said, believe what you want.”

  Dr. Martin, an older gentleman, looked up after connecting a ventilator to Deever. He shook his head. “This man needs surgery, Fred. I don’t have the equipment.”

  “Can’t you do anything for him?” said James.

  “I’ve done all I can. He’s stabilized for now. His heart is strong. I’ve got him ventilated. We have enough plasma to keep him alive for a while. We’ve got bandages and antiseptic. We’ve got antibiotics and painkillers. I stitched up the wound, but he’s got a bullet lodged in his spine and I can’t stop the internal bleeding.”

  “Then, take it out.”

  “I’d kill him if I tried. I’m a country doctor, not a surgeon, Fred. This man needs a hospital.”

  “What are his chances?”

  “You can’t turn a screw with a hammer, Fred. I’m just delaying the inevitable.”

  James turned to Dr. Crane. “You’re Dr. Jennifer Crane, aren’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve heard about you. You’ve done some amazing work.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Word is, MacClendon named the Jennifer Project after you. I assume you had a hand in it? The miniaturization has your name written all over it.”

  She looked away and whispered, “Yes.”

  “Why in God’s name did you help my father?”

  “They kidnapped and drugged her, Einstein,” said Katherine.

  “What about him?” James nodded toward Deever. “What’s his excuse?”

  “Deever did what he did to save me,” Dr. Crane said.

  “Your boyfriend destroyed the world to save one person? What kind of man does that?”

  “Who are you to judge?” She began to sob. “Deever’s a kind and gentle soul.”

  “What do you know about the Jennifer network?”

  “Not much.”

  “It has to have a weakness. Can you help us bring it down?”

  “You can’t bring it down, Mr. James. No one can. The Jennifer control program is on your father’s space station. It runs everything from there. It has its own power and network. It functions as an autonomous entity. It’s gotten so complex that even the humans who monitor it don’t understand it anymore.”

  James nodded. “So that’s why we could never find it.” He turned to Dave. “Options?”

  “We still control a couple nukes in silos out west,” said Dave. “Maybe we can shoot it down.”

  “Are you crazy?” said Dr. Crane. “That space station is protected by the most advanced weaponry in existence, and you want to attack it with a Cold War nuke? Best-case scenario? They would detonate the missile before it even got close and your nuke would fall harmlessly into the ocean. Worst case? They’d trigger the nuke in midair, and you’d be responsible for the worst nuclear disaster in history when the fallout rained down on the Earth.”

  “What if we take out the Space Elevator?” James said. “Cut them off.”

  “Even if you could get to the Pan-Robotics Tower, stopping the Elevator would only be a minor inconvenience. They don’t need it. They control every space agency on the planet. They’d send shuttles up until the elevator was repaired.”

  “We’ll blow up every damn one of them if we have to,” said Dave.

  “You’re missing the point,” said Dr. Crane. “The Pan-Robotics space station has a minimal crew and enough supplies to operate indefinitely. It’s self-sufficient. They grow their own food. They recycle waste into water. Their power is solar and nuclear. You’ll be long gone before they come falling out of the sky.”

  “We know there are humans in the chain of command,” said James. “What if we free one and get him to input a self-destruct order?”

  She shook her head. “This isn’t just a machine you’re dealing with, Mr. James. The Jennifer control program is intelligent, aware, and designed to protect itself. It’s got an AI like you wouldn’t believe. It would never allow that order.”

  “You’re talking like the machine is the one that’s in control.”

  “In a way, it is. Deever designed it like that. At first there was some oversight, but the project became too much for humans to manage. So the control program suggested changes to increase efficiency, slowly removing humans from the loop as it continued to grow. The Pan-Robotics board adopted every one of those suggestions because they were blind to everything but their precious bottom line. Now, there is no loop, just your father. You can’t win, Mr. James. The Jennifer Project is smarter than us in every way.”

  “If it’s so smart, why hasn’t it found us?” Dave said.

  “Don’t worry, it will,” she replied. “It’s just a matter of time.”

  “We can’t give up,” said James. “We’ve got to hang on. My father has been living on borrowed time and transplants for twenty years. He can’t live forever. If it means hiding in this hole, by God, we’ll live like rats if that’s what it takes. We’ll wait him out and take the world back when he’s gone and there’s no one left to run the Jennifer Project.”

  “You still don’t understand,” said Dr. Crane. “Your father has the same modified Biocard that I do. The Jen-Tech in it could keep him alive for another
six hundred years.”

  “What?”

  “You asked me what kind of man Deever is? I’ll tell you what kind. He’s a genius who created a new generation of Biocards with Nanemes that repair and regenerate tissue, bones, cells, everything. It’s a miracle that could change the entire course of human evolution. The engineered element in it has a six-hundred-year useful life. That’s how long the chip will function—six hundred years. Deever created it to save the human race. He created it to save me. And now your father has it.”

  “And your boyfriend just turned it over to him? Just like that?”

  “Your father is a treacherous evil man, Mr. James. You of all people should know that.”

  “And now he’ll outlive us all.”

  “We are so screwed, boss,” said Dave.

  “No,” James said. “We may not have MacClendon, but we’ve got her. That means we have the same Jen-Tech my father does. Maybe we can reverse engineer it. Maybe tap into the network with it somehow and bring it down that way. I don’t know, but we’ll figure something out.”

  “We’ve got to go, Jen,” said Katherine. “These guys can’t help us. They can’t even help themselves.”

  “I won’t leave Deever,” Dr. Crane replied.

  “We’re taking him with us, but we’ve got to go now.”

  “Where?”

  “There’s a place I know back in the city on the wrong side of town. There’s a doc there who owes me a favor big time.”

  “And chances are he’s one of them now,” said James.

  “Then, we’ll give ourselves up,” Katherine said. “It’s Deever’s only chance.”

  “If you move him, he’ll die,” said Dr. Martin.

  “And if we stay, he dies,” Katherine replied. “So, what are we supposed to do?” She looked around the room at the empty faces. “Fine. Just give us a vehicle and let us go. We’ll take our chances on the road.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” said Dave, raising his weapon. “Right, boss?”

  “I’m afraid he’s right,” said James. “We need that tech in Dr. Crane’s head, and you know too much. If they capture you and put a Two on you, they’ll know everything you do.”