by Steven James
Already he’d learned that she had her eyes augmented two years ago, so what Ripley had suggested was certainly possible—that she became a Purist after her surgery.
Her closet was neatly arranged, with the clothes carefully sorted and hanging in a row by color first and then by type. Wearing gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, he slid the clothes to one side and then the other to inspect the wall behind them.
He wasn’t necessarily looking for a secret compartment, just anything out of the ordinary.
But when he moved the shoe rack aside, he did find a cubbyhole, hidden under the floorboards, and in it was an actual book with a dogeared page about a Phoenix, a mythical bird that would die in flames and then rise from the ashes again, living forever because it could resurrect itself.
And beside it, two words scrawled onto the page: “Always free,” a favorite phrase of Purists.
In the search for answers, there’s nothing so tempting as making unfounded assumptions. Clues only meet together in the truth, and taken in isolation they often end up diverting investigations that they should help solve.
As he was arranging for his team to check the book for trace evidence and to search the case files for other references to a Phoenix in regard to Purist ideology, he heard from the medical examiner about the autopsy results for Ethan Bolderson.
“It seems that Mr. Bolderson didn’t die from blood loss or shock, but rather from manual strangulation,” the M.E. said. “Based on the nature of his injuries, I’m postulating that whoever killed him strangled him with just one hand. That would take ferocious strength.”
“Yes, it would,” Nick said. “Thanks. Send me the official results.”
After hanging up, Nick contacted the agent in charge of reviewing the security camera footage from the hospital. “Do you have a record of the visitors to Ethan Bolderson’s room?”
“Actually, we do. A woman enters the room before Agent Carlisle does.”
“Has she been identified?”
“Unfortunately, that would be a no. The angle was off and the camera didn’t get a good look at her—just a partial—but we’re running facial rec anyway to see what we can come up with. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Agent Carlisle told me that Ethan was dead when he went to speak with him.”
“Then right now this mystery visitor is our primary suspect.”
“Listen, look up Sienna Gaiman, an employee at Terabyne Designs. Run her through the system. See if you can match her with that partial on the video.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll get back to you.”
As Nick ended the call, he wondered if Sienna would really have had the strength to strangle Ethan with only one hand, and if not, what that might mean for the investigation.
He might need to speak again with Ripley to see if he’d noticed anything in Mr. Bolderson’s room that might indicate that someone had entered it by another means.
While a forensics team took over at Sienna’s place, Nick left for the production facility to speak with her coworkers and with Trevor Hathaway, hoping to find out everything he could about why this Terabyne technician had shown up at the warehouse this morning wearing a ski mask and pulling a gun on a federal agent.
23
I was early for lunch with my brother, so I stopped by to see how the techs were coming along with Jordan.
He was seated on a steel exam table staring blankly around the room, and I was concerned about him until the technicians assured me that they had finished their backup and were almost done optimizing his system and would be finished within the hour.
That worked out perfectly since it gave me a chance to have lunch with Trevor in the meantime.
However, the way Jordan’s gaze passed across me without registering any recognition was troubling.
“You’re sure he’s okay?”
“Oh, yes. This type of response is normal at this stage of the process.”
I found Trevor waiting for me in the food court by the menu stand for what appeared to be the most elegant eatery there. It was packed with patrons, and I didn’t see any available tables.
“How are you doing today?” he asked me. “Have they finished their work on Jordan?”
“I’m doing alright. They should be done with him around the time we finish lunch.”
“Great. I reserved one of the conference rooms upstairs so we can have a little privacy. They’ll bring the food up to us. What do you say?”
“Sure.”
“The portions are sizable. I hope you’re hungry.”
“Um. Okay.”
We ordered our lunch, both of us going for a sandwich and soup combo: his, a tempeh and mushroom panini with tomato bisque; mine, a falafel, tomato, and guacamole club with lentil soup.
He was quiet on the way to the conference room, and I couldn’t help but be anxious about how this was going to go. We’d spoken more in the last couple of days than we had in the past thirteen months, but still, we’d only skirted around the issues that separated us.
The conference room barely held the expansive table that monopolized it, and I had the sense that the walls must have been put up after the table was brought in. A wide digitized screen looked out at us from the far wall. Trevor and I had a seat across from each other near a sweating silver pitcher.
He poured us each a glass of water. I thanked him, and then he said, “You told me yesterday that someone ransacked your apartment. Did the authorities figure out who it was?”
I shook my head. “They’re still looking into it.”
“Well, I hope they find the person.”
“Me too.”
A palpable silence settled between us.
“Tell me about your last year,” I said as brightly as I could. “What have you been up to?”
“Work, mainly. That’s kept me busy—too busy, I’d say. With the Purist attacks escalating, I’ve hardly been able to take a break.” He downed some water. “On a more positive note, I can’t go into all the details, but the big news is we’ve come to a breakthrough in ASI development. If we knock this one out of the park, it’ll be a game changer, a huge leap forward for all of us.”
“Toward what?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how will we be leaping forward? What will we be leaping toward?”
“It’s progress, Kestrel,” he said flatly. “Progress is a good thing.”
I said nothing.
He was expressing the commonly held view that implementing technology whenever possible inevitably leads to progress.
The Purists of course didn’t believe that.
And in this case, I couldn’t help but agree with them.
ASI was not necessarily the answer to our problems.
As it was, we could already teach machines to do almost any task that humans could do better than humans could do it. Whether that was composing music, playing chess, running a marathon, diagnosing a disease, performing surgery, or doing virtually any repetitive task on an assembly line. Machines don’t get distracted, tired, or sick. You don’t have to pay them; there’s no worker’s comp or insurance or retirement accounts that you need to contribute to.
The scope of human activity that we once thought machines would never be able to do—writing a novel, playing soccer, directing a movie, and more—had all been conquered in the last decade.
Apart from biological functions, I was at a loss to come up with a task that an Artificial couldn’t do and I wondered if ASI breakthroughs were really what we needed in our world after all.
Since I knew that Trevor’s and my views along these lines diverged sharply, I decided to move the conversation away from the subject of Artificial Super Intelligence and asked him if there were any women in his life.
“Not at the moment,” he said. “You? Men?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m sure there’s someone out there for you.”
“You too.”
A pause, then he sighed. “Listen,
I’m sorry you felt like I was mocking your faith last year when we spoke.”
“We don’t need to talk about that.”
“I just don’t want it to be something that comes between us. The elephant in the room. I know when we were outside the chapel yesterday I told you that I didn’t want to discuss religion, faith, any of that.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it. I have two questions for you.”
“Are you sure? I mean, if this is—”
He held up his palm to signal me to stop. “I’m sure. Two questions and then we’ll put this behind us.”
I hesitated. “Okay.”
“So, my first question is how can you love a God who treats you the way he does? You never did anything wrong, never hurt anyone, and here your daughter dies when—if God’s as powerful as they say—he could have easily saved her. How does an event like that fit in with your view of him as loving?”
Even though I figured I should be thankful that Trevor wanted to have this conversation, right now I wasn’t too keen on tackling that particular question.
Truthfully, I didn’t want to think about Naiobi and why, despite my prayers and desperate pleas, God had allowed her to die, and I wasn’t sure what to say to my brother.
“I’m not as good as you’re making me out to be,” I told him at last. “No one is. Also, I can’t base my faith in God on how things go or else it would depend on constantly shifting circumstances rather than facts.”
“And what facts do you base it on now?”
“That Jesus really did live and then die and then rise from the dead. That’s the cornerstone of our faith. All our eggs really are in one basket. Disprove the resurrection and you disprove Christianity.”
“That’s a pretty bold claim.”
“Yes, but without the resurrection we have no living Savior, we have merely an enigmatic rabbi who heretically claimed to be equal to God and was crucified because he was a threat to those in power. Also, in the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, in chapter fifteen, he notes that if Christ has not been raised from the dead, then our faith is futile, we are hopeless and to be pitied more than all other people.”
Trevor was quiet and I had the sense that he was calculating a response, but before he could say anything, a knock came at the door and a server appeared with our meals.
My brother thanked her, tipped her, and then she soundlessly disappeared back into the hallway, leaving the two of us alone.
Not wanting to be showy or pretentious, I didn’t say a prayer of thanks for the food as I typically might have, but just whispered my thanks silently to God in my heart.
When Trevor still didn’t respond to what I’d said about the importance of the resurrection, I asked him what his second question was.
“Do you believe in hell?” he said.
“I do.”
“And that it lasts forever?”
“Weeping and gnashing of teeth isn’t a good thing, no matter how long it lasts,” I said. “Jesus made it clear that he believed in a place of punishment after death, and from everything he said, it’s a place you wouldn’t want to go—isolation, loneliness, despair, as well as both emotional and physical suffering.”
“So, sort of like being tortured in solitary confinement for a thousand years. But then multiplying it out to eternity.”
“Well . . .”
“But don’t you see, Kestrel? Why would a good God do that? Punish his so-called beloved children for a few slights, for just being human? An infinite punishment for finite transgressions? Can’t you see that a belief like that makes him into a monster?”
“He’s holy and pure. We aren’t. It would be more of a punishment to make those who desire to put themselves first stay in the presence of a perfect God than to separate them from him.”
“So hell is an example of God’s love,” he said incredulously, “not his punishment?”
“It’s both his justice and his love coming together. Just like everything he does. He can’t deny or contradict any part of himself, and if he’s both loving and just, then each of those attributes must naturally come out in every act he takes.”
“And so I’m going to hell.”
“I’m not here to judge you, Trevor.”
“But that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That everyone who refuses to believe as you believe—atheists, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, heck, maybe even Catholics—get to spend an eternity weeping and gnashing their teeth while you and everyone else who trusts in Jesus as their—quote, personal Lord and Savior, unquote—get to frolic around with him in paradise?”
I couldn’t tell if the edge that’d come into his voice was directed at me or at the God he had disavowed.
“Despite a person’s background or religious tradition,” I said, “if they’re saved it’s solely because of Jesus, because, on the cross, he suffered hell in their place and then rose to prove that God’s promises are true. It’s all about where you’re placing your confidence and hope—in Jesus and what he did, or in yourself and what you do.”
“You’re pretty passionate about this, aren’t you?”
“My faith is an important part of who I am.”
Really, Kestrel? Is that really true?
Trevor didn’t reply right away, and when he did, his words surprised me. “In our culture it’s socially acceptable to be passionate about almost anything other than Jesus Christ.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You can be passionate about Socrates, about gerbils wearing top hats, about saving arctic ice floes, about collecting purple rubber bands, whatever you want—but if it happens to be Jesus of Nazareth, you’re in trouble. You’ll be labeled a Jesus Freak or a Bible Thumper or a Science Denier or a fundamentalist and judged. Jesus, more than anyone else who’s ever lived, really is the line in the sand. It must be tough.”
I knew what side of the line Trevor stood on.
I was still trying to sort out if my position had changed.
“I’ve never thought about it quite like that,” I said.
A notification came through on Trevor’s slate and he glanced at it, then said to me, “It looks like Agent Vernon is here.”
“Really?”
“He wants to talk with me about what our division found in regard to the bombing. Should I ask him to wait or is it alright if I brief him?”
“Yes, yes, of course. Do what you need to.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s fine. Really.”
He messaged Nick, telling him where we were, and then the two of us went back to finishing our meal in the all too familiar stilted silence that had characterized our conversations back when we were actually having them.
I was finding it tough to read Trevor’s reactions to the answers I’d given him. I didn’t feel like we’d come to any kind of understanding or reconciliation, and that bothered me. It seemed like whatever progress we might have made had been undermined by my words about hell.
As I was finishing my soup, a light rap on the door caught my attention.
“Come on in,” Trevor called.
The door opened and Nick appeared. He greeted me in a professionally cordial way and then asked if he could have a few words with Trevor. “I know I keep showing up at bad times, Kestrel,” he said apologetically.
“No, it’s alright.” Honestly, I was relieved to be able to bow out of the awkward lunch with my brother. “Besides, I need to go pick up Jordan.”
* * *
Once Kestrel was in the hall, Nick said to Trevor, “I know that yesterday you spoke with Agent Carlisle. He’s no longer working this case. I’ll need the information you shared with him.”
“Of course.” Trevor looked curious about why the agent he’d started working with was no longer involved in the investigation, but he didn’t ask about it. “The office I’m using is just down the hall. That’s where my notes are. We can talk there.”
When they ar
rived at the room, Nick said, “One of the employees from the plant here was fatally wounded this morning when she tried to shoot a federal agent. She was the technician who checked Jordan in.”
“What?” The shock was clear in Trevor’s voice. “One of our employees was killed trying to shoot someone? Was she involved in the attack here at the plant?”
“That’s still to be determined.”
Trevor shook his head in disbelief and then indicated a chair. “Have a seat, Agent Vernon. I’ll pull up my files.”
* * *
Jordan was ready and waiting for me.
I expressed my gratitude to the technicians and asked them what I owed them, but they told me that Trevor had taken care of everything. I sent him a quick note of thanks through my slate.
As I led Jordan to the car, I asked how he was feeling and he assured me that he was fine.
“Thank you for jumping into the river yesterday,” I said. “For saving that boy.”
“Okay,” he replied, which sounded like an odd response.
“What were you thinking when you did that?”
“I’m not sure I was thinking anything, other than that I could do something to help him and I wanted that to be the case. I didn’t want him to die—no matter what. I couldn’t fathom letting that happen.”
We were almost to the car when I received a message on my slate: “The stars are aligned. 3:30. Eden Park.”
I stared at the words.
This is it. This is happening.
For a moment I debated whether or not to bring Jordan with me, but considering that I might be meeting with a known terrorist, I determined that having him along for protection would be best.
But will Conrad really meet with you?
Probably not. He’ll probably send a surrogate.
Still . . .
Whether it ended up being Conrad or someone from his group, this was the first actual contact we’d had with the Purists and it might be our best chance at finding out who was behind the bombing.
I pointed to my car. “Come on, Jordan. There’s somewhere we need to go.”