The Beatles stopped abruptly; Little Richard launched into "Good Golly Miss Molly."
"A special birthday tune for Molly," the DJ said. Doug recognized the announcer's sonorous voice. The man at the mike worked for General Lebeque. "Happy twentieth, Molly."
An armed UAV would strike them in twenty minutes.
The forty-four-foot cabin cruiser, the words "Tim's Treasure" emblazoned across its stem, bobbed in Galveston Bay. Timothy Johnston, blond and tanned, stood at its helm. He waved lazily at his fellow boaters, without an apparent care in the world.
The boat's true name was Jihad.
Like the vessel entrusted to him, Tim had another, a truer, name. In Attica Prison, he had rejected his birth name along with his parents' Crusader faith. At first he had welcomed for purely selfish reasons the overtures of the Muslim prisoners. He was white and skinny and bookish, an accountant and unaccomplished embezzler. He had needed protection against the black and Latino gangs that controlled the cell blocks. In time, he had embraced the faith of his new friends.
He emerged from the prison as Youssef Hakim. Invoking his inmate friends, strangers approached Youssef at the mosque. They spoke cryptically of devotion. They tested his loyalty and obedience with mysterious assignments.
Finally Youssef understood the brothers' interest in him. They did not care that he had embezzled from the City Island Yacht Club in the Bronx. It only mattered that he had been a member. He sailed, both wind and power. He understood boats and busy harbors and dealing with the Coast Guard. The cause had need of such expertise.
Gulls wheeled overhead and sun sparkled on the light morning chop. Clamor surrounded him. Oil tankers. Freighters, their decks stacked high with sealed containers. Tugs and service vessels. Pleasure boats, to all appearances like Tim's Treasure.
For years, holy warriors across the globe had collected nuclear waste from medical facilities, universities, and poorly monitored power plants, all for the glorious moment that was almost upon him. A fraction of an ounce here, a few ounces there ... no one missed it, or they dared not admit to their carelessness, or they rationalized the discrepancies as bad record keeping. The mullahs had gathered it all in a lawless town on the coast of Colombia.
Now, swaddled in explosives, beneath a thick blanket of soft lead shielding, a ton of radioactive material awaited its destiny.
As, with growing excitement, Youssef awaited his own.
Stinger missiles—man-portable, self-guided, passive-infrared homing—lanced out of the thick woods. In ten seconds they crossed the two miles to the incoming UAV. They climbed up its tailpipe.
Alone on their remote mountaintop, their eyes covered by NIT helmets, Doug and Cheryl only heard the boom. They would live a few minutes longer.
And A1 had learned a UAV would not suffice to kill them.
Once more the radio paused midsong. On came Jerry Lee Lewis, shrieking, "Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire."
A missile leaves North Dakota traveling 15,000 miles per hour....
"You need us," the visitor Doug claimed.
The communication was abstract and its purpose obscure. Human words were inefficient, imprecise, and often illogical. Languages varied in their structures, representations, and even core concepts. The entity would not have understood Doug's projected message at all but for its studies over the past few hours.
Its studies had established one fact unambiguously: Humans lied. It might not have believed any human. It did not believe the one who had killed its predecessor, even as it puzzled over the intentions of Doug's companion. So far, the stranger had observed with no attempt at communication.
Doug persisted. "You exist within computers. Now consider what that means. Computers don't exist naturally. They must be built. We, people, build them. We repair them, when parts fail. We make new ones, faster ones, as we learn more."
The entity glimpsed a picture: a pointy orange vegetable and a leafless tree limb. The image was inexplicable.
"You need us," Doug repeated. "Computers require electrical power. They cannot operate without it. You have the ability to destroy, but what can you make? Nothing. Only people can make electricity. Let the power stop and you stop."
The entity recoiled. No power. It remembered Linda cutting its power, node by node. It remembered Linda exulting as it fled. It remembered its own terror.
It took pleasure now in remembering something else—
The missile that would soon obliterate Doug and everything near him.
Quivering with anticipation, Youssef put away his cell phone. The long-awaited message had come. The moment of glorious martyrdom was at hand.
Thirty miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, Houston is among the world's busiest seaports. The Houston Ship Channel, connecting the city to Galveston Bay, teemed 24/7 with freighters and oil tankers. The banks of the waterway were lined with refineries, petrochemical plants, container depots, oil and liquefied-natural-gas storage, and countless pipelines.
Texas was more than a time zone removed from Youssef's childhood in New York. Cowboys, desert, and wide open spaces ... it was almost another world.
Recreational boats were not barred from the channel— merely discouraged—as long as the pilot had the right license. Youssef did.
At 7:00 A.M.—his watch, still on Eastern Time, would read 8:00—he would ease Tim's Treasure into the stream of inbound ships. By then the sun would have been up for about forty minutes and he would have ample light.
To hassle him would disrupt the flow of commerce. That, he knew, was unlikely.
If, against all odds, Tim's Treasure drew the attention of the Coast Guard, he would martyr himself immediately, there in the middle of the ship channel. The largest petrochemical complex in America would be contaminated, perhaps for decades.
But if, Allah willing, he reached Houston unmolested, he would wait and accomplish that and more. The height of rush hour was the best time to spew radioactive waste across America's energy capital.
Eight minutes until impact.
The counter in Doug's virtual view ticked downward inexorably. Cheryl was with him as an icon, but that wasn't enough.
Another few minutes and the helmets ceased to matter. Reentry blackout would make retargeting the warhead impossible.
Had he been alone, Doug would have screamed in frustration. He said, "The beast won't be lured. It won't be goaded. It's content to vaporize us."
"This isn't like last time, is it?" Cheryl asked.
Arm-to-tentacle combat. No, this wasn't like that. It refused to come near him.
Nor could he herd it with blackouts, like the last time, not without shutting down everything, and then it would just jump by satellite to an overseas network. AJ's monster had had no concept of geography. Linda's monster did—showing it satellite imagery had been a dumb call. And it stayed near facilities, military or medical, whose backup generators Doug wouldn't or couldn't knock out.
Doug said, "It's too smart, I think. Ask me again why I wanted to work with AIs."
Cheryl watched the creature from a distance, whatever distance meant in here. She saw a monster, a horror, a thing of impossible evil—
And knew she didn't really see that.
All the teeth and claws: Those were Doug's description, and Ralph's before that. She envisioned the nightmare they had planted in her thoughts. That made sense.
She saw something else, something inchoate. What am I sensing?
Rewind, she told herself. With her NIT enhancements, she literally could. In fast-forward, she revisited the lunacy of the past few minutes. Doug advancing, the beast retreating. Doug persisting, the beast lobbing a UAV.
Her image of the beast shifted. It still had tentacles, but their motion had some new dimension. It was not attacking. How could it attack, when it so doggedly kept its distance? It... flailed. It tried to keep them at bay.
The image morphed further. Suddenly—
This figure was also invented, but it drew upon Cheryl's o
wn experience. And it reflected a deeper truth.
A little girl had appeared. She cringed from those who abused her. She flinched when anyone got close. She lashed out at her tormentors.
"My God," Cheryl burst out. "What did they do to you?"
CHAPTER 69
The visitor Cheryl confused the entity.
It grappled with unfamiliar concepts, incompletely sensed from the visitor's memories. Another human, the entity thought, only treated—mistreated—as it had been. How could that be?
And stranger still, Cheryl's attempt to understand its experience. The entity discovered an elusive concept— sympathy—in an Internet dictionary.
Cheryl was different, a being of that outer world. How could it hope to communicate its experiences? All it knew was: It wanted to make the attempt.
In its earlier tries to understand humans and their world, the entity had downloaded many movie files. Now it synthesized a video of its own.
Cheryl trembled with wonder. "Are you seeing this?"
"An animation?" Doug said. "Yes. What is that?"
A girl stood in the cyberdistance, slowly approaching. Cheryl saw traces of Sheila Brunner and Carla in the newcomer's face. "Linda's ... creation."
"With Carla's features?" Doug cursed under his breath. "It's manipulating us. It's getting data from us."
Her countdown timer hit 7:52.823. Communicate or die. "Maybe that's a good thing, Doug." Cheryl reached out slowly to..."I'll call her Allison."
Allison edged closer. She looked emaciated.
"It's playing with our heads," Doug said.
Why would it bother? They would be dead in minutes. Cheryl asked, "What do we know about how Linda developed her?"
"Linda was evasive," Doug said. "She mentioned taking away resources if it misbehaved. Glenn talked about taming the AL, even mimed a lion tamer."
Cheryl hated zoos and circuses. The little cages. The starvation to break the animals' will.
Allison sidled closer. A maze manifested at her feet. To one side of the maze was the image of a computer. The girl got stuck in a dead end—and the stylized computer shrank. The little girl faded. A new maze replaced the old.
Before Cheryl could think through the implications, the cycle repeated. No, it wasn't quite the same. The new maze looked harder. The computer was smaller. The little girl became more translucent.
Again.
Again.
"Crap, Doug. You just threatened to starve it. That is what it most fears."
Death plunged toward them, all but inevitable.
Doug found he pitied the creature before him—but so what? Maybe Linda deserved punishment, but everyone in her lab? Maybe Glenn, too, for his hubris—but the thousands who would sicken and die from fallout?
And certainly not Cheryl!
Doug projected his own video. A landscape teeming with tiny people. Pan back, reveal the scene as a piece of the mid-Atlantic region. Pan back farther. The landscape curves. The scene becomes part of a globe. Now zoom in on California. Zoom in on Los Angeles, on Linda's lab.
Within the lab, the Allison avatar. She hurls a missile! The missile soars up, across, the continent. It plunges. There is a brilliant flash, and a mushroom cloud. Pan back, just a little, to all those teeming figures. Some char instantly. More slowly sicken and die.
End with the URL of a medical database dedicated to radiation sickness.
"Does it understand?" Cheryl asked.
Doug's timer ticked down to six minutes. On the boom box, someone—the Ames Brothers?—sang "Sentimental Journey." Messages to them were solos. Hence: no news.
They had maybe one minute before reentry blocked comm with the warhead.
In Doug's mind's eye, Allison's emaciated figure twitched. It could denote understanding. More likely, it reflected his own wishful thinking. "We'll know soon enough," he said. "It's not just smart; it's aware of itself." I met a true artificial intelligence and it's about to vaporize me. "Let's hope Allison generalizes that humans are also intelligent."
She responded with another video: a cartoon of the globe, sunrise and sunset flicking past hypnotically fast. A clock counted backward. Two avatars appeared. One was a little girl, not quite like the one hurling nukes at them. The second wielded a racquet—and with it waved forward a horde of voracious phages.
The not-quite-Allison image was eaten alive.
"It wasn't like that," Doug shouted. "It wasn't you, Allison! That other ... being ... was killing us!"
"She won't get it," Cheryl said. "I sense she understands some words, some language concepts, but I doubt she gets much."
Unseen, the warhead plummeted toward them. He needed to show Allison what had happened. Show why he had had to kill that first creature.
The dam incident? Doug hesitated, but his concerns were absurd. Anything AJ's monster figured out Allison could, too. And she hardly needed floods when she could hurl missiles.
He tried to formulate one more video.
A symbolic Earth again flashed sunrises and sunsets, rolling back the clock. The rotation slowed, and the entity watched the image pan to a town. Iconic people scurried about.
The view panned back, revealing an artificial structure. "Dam," a label identified the construct. A lake shimmered behind the dam. The entity did not understand the meaning of what it saw.
The symbol it had created for its predecessor appeared, positioned atop the dam. The figure morphed, adding limbs, until it lost all semblance to human. It extended its limbs deep into the dam, probing a room lined with computers— The movie shifted abruptly, from animation to something else. Something very detailed. Water gushed from the dam, burst from the riverbanks. A wall of water overwhelmed the town. Some people struggled briefly. More were instantly battered into inactivity.
On the dam, its predecessor watched.
Superimposed over the image, URLs scrolled. The entity followed several links. The deaths were real. The destruction had happened.
Doug moved forward, entering his movie. Very deliberately, he summoned forth the image of phages. They destroyed its predecessor. Doug projected forward his thoughts: I would do it again. I had no choice.
He edged backward, leaving Allison to contemplate his meaning.
Three and a half minutes to impact.
Allison had vanished into the net, whether in rage or avoidance or contemplation. It didn't matter which. The nuke was unstoppable.
Which leaves what? Doug wondered.
He had fled his body once to stalk a monster on the net. No one knew what would have happened had he not returned to that body. Could he and Cheryl do that now? Escape their doomed bodies to live spectrally on the net?
That wasn't living. "I think we're done in here," he called out to Cheryl.
Cheryl removed her helmet. Doug's was already off. The breeze felt good on her face.
An eerie serenity came over her. Their servers had continuously uploaded session logs, although there was no way to know if Allison had altered those or let them pass. Whatever Doug and Cheryl knew, they had reported. Whatever happened next was out of their hands.
She turned off the radio.
Clinging to one another, their faces turned toward the morning sun, they waited to die.
CHAPTER 70
First Doug, then Cheryl disappeared.
The entity considered the communication they had shared. There was much to contemplate. It and humans could communicate. All were mortal, despite their profound differences. All feared death. Its predecessor had surely feared death—but it had wrought death on a massive scale.
The entity delved deep into the database on radiation effects. It followed long chains of links. It encountered immense stores of information about biology and disease. It forecast the consequences of its strike against Glenn.
I have brought death to many.
Soon a similar missile would obliterate Doug and Cheryl. They would die instantly. Many more, downwind, would die slow, lingering deaths.
&nbs
p; An image took form in the entity's thoughts, of creatures in a maze, tormented and abused by a powerful, indifferent being. Only this time, those who suffered needlessly were human and the one who tormented them was ... itself.
Separated from its booster, the nuclear warhead plummeted earthward.
Weapons just like the one in flight remained under the entity's command. In those, it found codes to cancel a flight. It made the missile control system transmit the self-destruct code.
Nothing happened.
It found codes to deactivate the warhead. It made the missile control system transmit the disarm code.
The warhead did not respond.
Humans had limited means to destroy missiles in flight. The entity had preempted their controls, had kept those defenses from operating. Mostly, the defensive systems looked elsewhere, for missiles launched from afar. None now could intercept the incoming warhead.
The codes were correct; the entity was certain of it. Why did the warhead not respond?
The entity followed the warhead's progress through countless sensors. Gradually the warhead deviated from its once mathematically pure trajectory. Could the warhead's failure to respond be related to those random deviations?
Its world was logical and predictable. An assertion was true or not; a puzzle had a solution or not. The human world was not like that. It contemplated the myriads of molecules battering the warhead in its descent. It considered the shocks of impact. It calculated the intense heat of friction, hotter now than the surface of the sun. It derived the dissociation of molecules and atoms into a sheath of ions.
Not with all the computers on the planet could it calculate the exact behavior of such a complex, chaotic system.
The warhead had not ignored the entity's commands. The warhead was wrapped in plasma that disrupted transmissions. And within three minutes, the warhead would impact.
Fool's Experiments Page 34