by Brian Nelson
Nanocomputers will be smaller than synapses, and assembler-built wires will be thinner than the brain’s axons and dendrites…It seems that a structure similar to the brain will fit in less than a cubic centimeter…[and will be] over ten million times faster…Every ten seconds, [this] system completes as much design work as a human engineer working eight hours a day for a year…In an hour, it completes the work of centuries.
—K. Eric Drexler, 1986
Rear Admiral Curtiss slammed his fist on his desk. “God-fucking-damn it!”
Admiral Garrett raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. He knew Curtiss had every right to be angry.
“You told me when this all started that I could run it my way, that you’d let me call the shots. But now you’re telling me I have to let this ride. This?”
“I’m sorry, Jim, but you know as well as I do that there’s too much at stake.”
Curtiss picked up the Fly’s intelligence brief one more time, then crumpled it in his fist. Project Crimson. God, a part of him wished it weren’t true. But he knew it was, every word of it. It was good intel. Fucking perfect. And that was the whole problem: it was too good.
At eleven forty-five tomorrow night, on the Fourth of July, a genetics postdoc named Xu Jian-min would enter the Anderson Hall Library with a janitor’s pass card. He would take a bag to the third aisle of the engineering section, between call numbers TP 248.25 .S47 and TP 248.25 .Z25. The bag would contain a clever bomb that would explode downward through the deck, spewing, and then igniting, a mixture of gelling compound and jet fuel—a little like napalm but nastier—into the cool room below, where the NRL kept its biggest supercomputer. The ensuing fire would be unstoppable, consuming the whole building and—the enemy hoped—destroying all evidence of the bomb, leading the Americans to assume that it was an accidental fire that started in the library.
Curtiss shook his head. The enemy knew precisely where to hit them. There were four Cray supercomputers on base, but the one under the library was special. The 75,000-cpu system was hands down the fastest computer in the world, the SR-71 of computers, far surpassing the Crays at both Oak Ridge and Sandia. But more than its speed, the Cray housed the lab’s prototype artificial-intelligence system. While not nearly as fast or as compact as the AI systems would become after replication, it was getting faster and smarter every day. It was an ingenious piece of work, coded largely by a single NUB named Ryan Lee. In the past month, it had helped solve some of their toughest design problems. It was the main reason they were catching up to the Chinese.
But the hardest thing to stomach about this whole shit sandwich was that he could do nothing about it.
“I’m sorry, Jim, but our hands are tied,” Garrett said. “The situation in Tangshan is too delicate. If we thwart the plan, Meng will know too much.”
“But he already suspects Bo Li. It was in the report.”
“The secret police are watching him, that’s all, just as they’re likely watching forty others. If he plays it cool, he’ll come away from this clean. But if we prevent the bombing, that puts them too close to putting their finger on him. We can’t risk it, and you know it. We’ll win a battle but lose—”
Curtiss slammed his fist down again. He was tired of platitudes. He suddenly wanted to lift up the huge conference table and heave it on top of Garrett, crushing the CNO and his goddamn baby-blue eyes.
“You’re just going to let him do it?” Curtiss said. “Let Jian-min plant his bomb … let the Cray burn … and let people die.”
Garrett nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do. And so will you. That’s an order.”
There it was. If there had been any chance of saving innocent lives, along with their single biggest asset, it was gone. He’d been given a direct order to stand down. Obey. It was a word conditioned into him since his first days at Annapolis. The word that everything in the navy depended on.
“Fuck you, Mitch,” he said, and stormed out.
* * *
“Let’s go to the fireworks,” Ryan said.
This brought sardonic laughter and shouts of “Forget it” and “Wouldn’t that be nice.”
Eric, Jane, Ryan, and Isaac were holed up in a conference room, busting ass to finish a prototype for Olex and Jack that was due by noon tomorrow. No more excuses, or heads would roll. They had been working on it all week, sleeping only an occasional hour or two. They were exhausted and frazzled. Worse, with less than sixteen hours left, they were completely stuck.
They kept looking at the clock: 8:27 p.m. … 8:29 … 8:32. It had become a nervous tic.
“No, listen,” Ryan said. “It’s only a twenty-minute walk from here. We go, watch the fireworks, and run back. By ten fifteen, we’re back, refreshed and ready to go. Have you ever seen the fireworks on the mall? They’re the best in the country.”
“Can’t do it, guys,” Isaac said, “I have a wife and four-year-old at home. Can’t afford to get purged.”
For a moment, Ryan looked deflated—but only for a moment. “Fourth of July,” he coaxed. “A national holiday. Look around. The whole base is deserted. Everyone in the country’s out having a good time.”
That struck a chord with Eric. Ryan was right. It wasn’t fair how much they had to work. “Let’s do it! I can’t think anymore, anyway.”
“It’s settled,” Ryan said. “Come on, they’re gonna start in half an hour.”
“Forget it, you two,” Jane said, “It’s no joke that we could lose our jobs.”
Five minutes later, Jane and Eric were outside on the lawn, waiting for Ryan and Isaac. “We shouldn’t be doing this,” she said again.
The sun was setting over the Potomac—orange and red and beautiful. It was stiflingly hot, the air heavy with moisture, but Eric was just grateful to be outside, breathing real air. He looked at his watch. “How long does it take that little Korean to pee?”
But Jane’s attention had turned to the other side of the quad, where four workmen were coming out of Anderson Hall. “I wonder what they’re doing,” she said.
“Uh, maybe whatever it is that electricians do,” Eric said. “You know, like fix the lights.”
Jane rolled her eyes. “At nine o’clock on the Fourth of July? No, they aren’t electricians.”
“What?”
“They’re some kind of military team.”
Eric took a closer look. The men were dressed in white coveralls with “Dynamo Electric” printed on the back. “What makes you think that?”
“When you spend eighteen years of your life on military bases, you learn to spot them. See the long hair and beards? That’s called minimal adult supervision. Plus, there’s something about them, the way they move. They’re very relaxed in their skins.”
But Eric wasn’t buying it. “We’re in a high-security military facility. Why would they be in disguise?”
“I don’t know,” she conceded. “But apparently, they don’t want anyone to know what they’re doing.”
Isaac and Ryan came bounding out the door and down the steps, moving past them at a run. “Come on,” Ryan said, tracking Jane’s eyes. “You can check out the beefcake later.”
“Damn NUB,” Jane muttered.
That began a mad dash to reach the Lincoln Memorial before dark. The humidity was so thick that within moments they were drenched in sweat, hair slick and faces glistening as if they had been running for miles. As they hurried through East Potomac Park, they each gave their responses to a question that Ryan had posed. He loved to challenge them with the most random questions. Tonight’s question: If you could design anything you wanted after replication, what would it be?
“That’s easy: synthetic meat,” Isaac said.
“What?”
“That’s right, meat. Then my damn vegan wife (whom I love with all my heart) might get off my back. God help me, every time I eat anything with meat—and I m
ean anything with even a molecule of animal tissue—she’s all over me. She loves to sing that Smiths song, ‘Meat Is Murder.’ Even when I’m at work, she’ll text me right before lunch with a link to the song.”
They all laughed.
“What about you, Hill?” Ryan said.
“Ah, it’s kinda silly—an idea I had when I was an undergrad.”
“Well, let’s hear it,” Ryan said.
He hesitated. “You’re gonna laugh, but I’d make minifabricators, shoebox size, that only made Twinkies, and I’d have them airdropped over Ethiopia, Sudan, wherever, on little parachutes. And in one fell swoop, Twinkie the Kid and I would end world hunger. I always imagined the cover of Time magazine. Men of the Year: me and the Kid.”
“Thank you, Miss America,” Ryan said, “That’s the worst answer I’ve ever heard.”
“My turn,” Jane said. “I’d develop a cure for Alzheimer’s.”
“You, too?” said Ryan. “Isn’t the world overpopulated enough?”
As was always the case whenever Ryan said something Jane didn’t like, she tried to hurt him. She grabbed his shirt with one hand and made a fist with the other, but he squirmed free and went tearing off into the baseball field they were passing. “No, I didn’t mean it!” he cried. “It’s a great idea, really.” He ran around the backstop and headed for first, but Jane caught him in right field. “Please don’t beat me!” he yelped. “I take it back. No, not the face. Ow-ow-ow-ow!”
Ryan lay there in the grass, trying to catch his breath. Jane standing over him. “My grandmother had Alzheimer’s,” she said. “It ain’t pretty.”
Ryan got up cautiously and dusted himself off. “While all of your ideas have merit—well, except Hill’s—they nevertheless lack the entrepreneurial spirit that has made this country great. In dramatic contrast, my idea”—and here he pointed his thumb at his chest like a proud little kid—“will fill an important niche in the global marketplace.”
“Here it comes,” Isaac said.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I am going make the world’s greatest virtual sex machine and become filthy rich. I’ll have nanosites take up residence in your nerve cells—”
“But in some nerve cells more than others,” Eric offered.
“Absolutely, and I’ll project different images on the eye and directly stimulate the brain. People will forget about food and sleep and other people. It’ll be great.”
“A sex machine—how original,” Jane said. “You’ve already chosen your theme song, haven’t you?”
“Yeeeeooooow! That’s right! James Brown’s my man!”
They couldn’t help but laugh, even Jane.
They crossed Independence Avenue, and the crowd grew thick around them, slowing them down. By the time they reached the Lincoln Memorial, they had to push and shove to get through, but they soon found that every inch of available space was taken. By the time the fireworks started, they found themselves on the lip of the reflecting pool, teetering between the water and the wall of people. But the overhanging trees blocked the view, so they couldn’t see a thing.
“Glad we skipped work for this,” Isaac said.
Eric sighed. It had been a dumb idea after all. Then he felt a shove from behind, and in he went, thigh-deep in unpleasantly warm water, his sneakers sinking into mud before hitting the concrete bottom. “What the fu—”
He turned and saw Jane with her hands on her hips, laughing—obviously very pleased with herself. Then she jumped in after him. “The view is much better,” she cried back to the shore. And it was. Isaac and Ryan shrugged at each other and hopped in.
A group of teenagers pointed and laughed, then jumped in, too, and that was all it took. Soon, there were scores of people standing in the water. The ducks gave them a wide berth, their quacking inaudible over the boom of fireworks and the music.
They were the best fireworks Eric had ever seen. He felt a wave of bliss roll over him, here with his friends, feeding off the euphoria of the crowd … the Washington Monument celebrated in kaleidoscope color … Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” so loud it fibrillated his heart … and all God’s colors reflected in the water around them. Near the end, he caught a glimpse of his friends: the perspiration on their faces, the way their wet shirts sucked to their skin, and the proud way they all looked to the sky. He felt blessed to have them.
His eyes lingered on Jane, and he was reminded of something he had felt when they first met: that she was beautiful but didn’t know it.
She turned and smiled. “Okay,” she admitted, “it was a good idea.”
After the fireworks, Ryan suggested they go for a beer.
“You guys, we really can’t afford to waste any more time,” Jane said. But even as she said this, she was leading the way to her favorite bar in Foggy Bottom.
Inside the Parish, surrounded by dark wood and stained glass, Isaac went for a pitcher of beer and a basket of wings. When he got back, Ryan held up his iSheet. It was playing the Smiths.
“It’s death for no reason and death for no reason is MURDER …”
Isaac gave him the finger, and everyone laughed.
For a good hour, they joked and laughed and drank. Now that Isaac had a few beers under his belt, he began talking about his favorite subject: his four-year-old daughter, Amanda.
“I met her,” Jane said. “She’s adorable.”
Isaac beamed. “She’s still wetting the bed, so I told her, ‘You need to listen to your body. When it tells you you need to go, you know, do what it says.’ To that, she said, ‘Daddy, it’s not my fault. My body needs to talk louder.’”
On and on he went. Eric and Ryan and Jane would alternately laugh and congratulate him at each story. “That’s hilarious.”
Isaac finally gave a sideways smirk and said, “Thanks for humoring me. I know I’m boring you, but when you have kids you’ll be doing the same thing.”
It was past midnight by the time they made it to the wooded grove on the north end of the base.
Just as they were emerging from the woods, they saw him.
“Is that Jian-min?” Jane said.
They watched as he shuffled to a stop under one of the walkway lights. He was looking every which way, clearly nervous and unsure of himself. Not the confident Yale grad Eric remembered. He had on a blue backpack, and whatever was inside, while not large, was so heavy it pulled the bag into the small of his back. After a moment, he swung it off, unzipped it, and looked inside. A long moment later, he nodded his head as if steeling himself for a difficult task, rezipped the pack, and slung it back over his shoulder.
At that moment, he lifted his eyes toward them. They drew back with a collective suck of air—but then relaxed. It was obvious he couldn’t see them. They were in the shadows of the trees, while he was bathed in the walkway light.
“Now, what in the world is Mr. Ivy League doing at the Science Library at midnight on a holiday?” Jane said.
“He’s probably trying to keep his job, like the rest of us,” Isaac said. “People pull all-nighters in there all the time.”
“With Sputnik in his backpack?” Jane said. “Look, if it were anyone else, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt, but not Jian-min. He’s always asking me bizarre questions about my work and what the other teams are doing. He’s up to something.”
“It’s probably nothing,” Eric said. “Come on, we can’t afford to waste any more time.”
“No, I want a closer look.” And without another word, she moved out of the shadows, slipping from tree to tree, then she made a quick dash for the left side of the building. With her back to the red brick wall, she inched up to the corner. Jian-min was in the entryway, and Jane was just around the corner. It was an odd image, like something out of a cartoon: the two of them only three feet apart but unable to see each other.
Jian-min swiped his badge, and t
he electric lock clicked open. He gave a last furtive glance around, then slipped inside.
Jane peeked around the corner, then quickly caught the door before it closed.
She motioned them over.
Ryan whined, “But I don’t wanna stalk people.” But Eric and Isaac were already moving toward the door. Ryan gave a groan and followed.
“Hurry up,” Jane hissed as they drew close. “He’s heading toward the library.”
“Wait a minute,” Ryan protested. “There must be a hundred Chinese Americans working at the lab. You can’t go stalking everyone who decides to pull an all-nighter.”
Jane shook her head. “No, this can’t be a coincidence.”
Eric remembered the “electricians” they had seen earlier, and realized she might have a point. “Let’s just call Marine One,” Eric said. He thought of the security posters plastered all over campus. Security is common sense. Don’t take chances.
“Stop being such a bunch of pussies,” Jane hissed. “Jesus! I’ve got more balls than the three of you put together.”
That shut them up, and they moved down the hallway together. Eric was struck by how eerily quiet Anderson Library was. Usually, regardless of the hour, there were people working here, talking in the halls, caffeinating themselves, or rummaging around the vending machines.
At the first bend in the corridor, they peeped around the corner. Seeing the coast was clear, they filed into the hallway.
They had gone only a few steps when Jian-min emerged from a doorway. He must have heard their footsteps.
Eric would never forget the way he looked at them over his glasses. Exhausted and conflicted, his hand inside the backpack.
“What are you doing here, Jian-min?” Jane asked.
No answer.
“Jian-min, we’re talking to you,” Isaac said.
Still no answer.
“The Cray,” Ryan muttered as he suddenly put the pieces together. “Oh, no! You can’t.”
“My parents,” Jian-min said. “They have my parents.”
“Please, you can’t do this,” Ryan said. “It’ll ruin everything.”