Resurrection America

by Jeff Gunhus

  “Stop moving,” she yelled. “Stop so I can help you!”

  But the man screamed louder as a robotic arm swung over his head.

  The disks attached to the robotic arms all around her lowered in unison. She dug her fingers into the buckle but it wouldn’t give.

  With a cry, she climbed onto the gurney and jumped at the robotic arm. It swung wildly to one side, the disk with the needles in it flailing.

  The row of needles tore across her back, slicing through her shirt and skin.

  She screamed at the pain and felt a hot gush of blood down the side of her rib cage as she fell to the ground.

  The robotic arm self-corrected and repositioned the disk over the man’s head.

  Cassie spotted the power connection at the base of the robotic unit. As the drills descended, she lunged for the power cord and yanked on it. The connection came loose, but instead of stopping immediately, the robotic arm jerked wildly as it powered down.

  She climbed to her feet, ready to free the man and had to stifle a scream when she looked on the gurney.

  The man’s head was shattered into pieces, carved up by the errant drill. Flaps of skin still showed parts of the man’s face on the larger chunks. Cassie turned away, grabbing the side of the bed as she vomited on the floor.

  All around her, the sound of the drills stopped. Within seconds of each other, the arms retracted from their patients and came to rest. On these beds, the people lay unmoving, hands to their side, faces calm as if they were in a comfortable sleep. The only thing unnerving was the metal disk attached to their head with a thick cable coming off it. She knew that under that disk were dozens of probes drilled through their skulls and into their brains.

  The whine of the drills echoed in the chamber, but soon, the cavern was silent.

  Except for the soft, pulsating hum of the electrical monitoring equipment.

  Cassie stifled a sob as she looked out over the sea of beds, each looking like an island of light. She tried to calm herself and think through what she was looking at.

  There were heavy cords coming from the base of each patient’s head that tied into the mounds of cabling running between the grid of beds. She examined the monitor nearest her that showed a 3-D model of the man’s brain. It showed a swirl of brilliant color. To the layman, it would just appear to be a pretty image. To her, it was a mesmerizing insight into what the probes had accomplished. And it was unbelievable.

  The colors indicated a level of activity she’d never seen before. Certainly in her own work she’d attempted to unlock cognitive space, tried to unlock potentiality. Her teams had had small successes, but nothing like this. If the 3-D model displayed was true and not some kind of enhanced filter, then the technology at work here was more advanced than anything she’d ever seen.

  And the cords.

  They were more than power lines for the lights and monitors.

  The cords networked all of the bodies together.

  She knew the theoretical science of brainet. She also knew that it was impossible. Only the smallest advances had even been made. Linking simian brains to perform basic tasks. True that in these experiments, the combined brains were able to outperform the single brain by a substantial rate. But Dr. Kalabi out of Johns Hopkins had proven the system limits that prevented a human brainet. The failure rate exponentially curved to one hundred percent as complexity was added. Based on that peer-reviewed science, the idea of a brainet had joined the ranks of cold fusion, another theoretical dead end.

  But someone had figured it out.

  Or at least thought they had.

  She looked back at the screen and at the level of activity depicted there.

  If they had unleashed that much brain potential, and then were able to fuse it together into a functioning massively parallel network, then she was looking at the greatest source of computing power in the history of the human race.

  The scientist in her marveled at the accomplishment, but the thought didn’t stay with her long. Clearly this discovery wasn’t meant for good. It would not be used to cure cancer or develop alternative energy sources or design a new line of antibiotics.

  Two thousand civilians taken hostage through a military operation. The story about a virus and a vaccine to control the population to get them sedated. All of the lies added up to a terrible conclusion.

  This was not a scientific discovery in front of her. It was a weapon.

  And now Keefer’s speech down in the town made sense. He’d talked about the resurrection of America, the destruction of her enemies. And he’d talked about the sacrifice of the patriots gathered in front of him.

  He’d called them martyrs for the cause of freedom.

  She looked back at all the beds extending out in front of her.

  And she understood.

  None of them would survive. Perhaps it was already too late. Perhaps the probes in the brain alone had already sealed their fate.

  There was no way she could know for sure, but it didn’t matter. Even if her own actions caused the death of everyone there, she had to do it. She had to destroy the machine in front of her before it could be used.

  And, by a miracle, she had a good idea of how to do it.

  53

  Keefer watched his dream come to fruition from the doorway to the main lab. He looked out over the main cavern, knowing he was only looking at less than half of the bodies involved. The others were in the adjacent caverns, all linked together in one glorious computer. As the robotic arms did their work, he was so overcome with emotion that tears streaked down his cheeks.

  He didn’t bother to cover his ears even though the sound was deafening. After so many years of preparation, so many near-misses where he thought the plan might be discovered, so many times that the entire thing seemed about to unravel, the emotion of seeing it all come together was almost too much to bear.

  His doubts were gone now. Seeing the precision movement of the robot arms and the perfection of the execution so far, showed that this was ordained. Perhaps not by God, even Keefer wasn’t sure the Creator would sign-off on his plan to undo a millennia of population growth, but it was ordained by some power greater than himself. He was sure of it.

  Call it the march of history. Or manifest destiny. Or karma.

  America had served as a beacon to the world for two and a half centuries. She’d been selfless, putting other nations before herself, sending her sons and daughters to bleed on foreign shores to liberate peoples all around the world. And for what? To be reviled and attacked? Called the Great Satan by the barbarians who slaughtered civilians?

  America had done her best to help the rest of the world, and her very existence was threatened because of it. The old saying had it right, No good deed goes unpunished. Only now Keefer had created the opportunity for America to save herself. It was a right she’d earned over a long period of time. The best century in human history had been the one dominated by America. And it would be that way again. Perhaps forever this time.

  He glanced back at Rick. The sheriff was on his knees, clutching the little boy and the woman to him. When the drills started, the boy had been shocked out of his stupor and immediately started to scream. Keefer had hardly noticed, but now that the drills were winding down their work, little Charlie’s cries filled the air.

  The thought crossed Keefer’s mind to just have the three of them taken away and disposed of. He felt embarrassed by the weakness he’d shown in front of them. Doubt wasn’t normally part of his makeup. The moment had been fleeting but dangerous. He actually wondered whether, if the sheriff had chosen to kill the woman and her child, his own heart would have been swayed. He doubted it. But Rick’s decision had made it easy.

  Having the sheriff there as a foil had been good. It wasn’t lost on him that pressing the button to end the lives of billions of people would come with a heavy emotional burden, one that might prove too hard to heft onto his shoulders when the moment came. He’d thought of nothing but that for years. But h
e’d convinced himself he could do it. The result made it all worthwhile.

  No, more than worthwhile. The result made the act absolutely necessary.

  Still, as he turned back to look at the rows of beds filled with the patriots who would give their lives for their country, he couldn’t help but imagine the scenes that would soon play out around the world.

  In a connected world, nothing was safe from the power he would have at his disposal. Cyber warfare had only made this moment more possible. The rise of powerful encryption technologies had made countries more vulnerable, not less. Hiding behind their firewalls, vast networks of essential services remained networked on the belief the wall could never be breached. The breach of the Genysis encryption was the perfect example. It would have taken the world’s most powerful computer hundreds of years to compute a solution. Even then, while the computer was working on the solution, the encryption algorithm continuously evolved, presenting a different problem to solve. It was impossible to circumvent.

  A brainet of only four people had solved it in only a fraction of a second.

  Keefer could only imagine the power of two thousand Americans working together.

  It wasn’t a matter of hacking into essential systems and wreaking havoc. The end of the world was to be instantaneous. He would be everywhere simultaneously. Inside every system, through every firewall, burrowed into everything from the mainframes running national power grids all the way down to each individual cell phone. He would be inside every satellite orbiting the planet. He would control the safety protocols in nuclear reactors, hydroelectric dams, subway systems. Every military system, from unmanned drones to ships, from bombs stored in bunkers to smart munitions inside weapons in the field, all of it would respond to his command.

  The massive Genysis supercomputers in the underground lab, air-gapped to prevent Morris from knowing what was going on, had been running simulations directed by Kalabi over the last month. The system simulated open access to the world’s most important computer infrastructure, using a powerful artificial intelligence algorithm, following a core directive.

  Destroy the human population outside the territorial United States.

  The program showed surprising restraint in the simulation of how it achieved its goal. Keefer had anticipated the widespread use of nuclear arsenals in the model, but their use was limited. The idea was to leave the United States not only intact, but with a habitable world. The AI sorted through the parameters and created a solution set so elegant and so frighteningly deadly, that it seemed almost too simple.

  The Middle East would be immediately destroyed with nuclear attacks from Europe and Russia, calculated so that the fallout would not impact the North American continent, but would still transform that Godforsaken region into a layer of glass from the melted sand. The nest of Jihadis would be set on fire and destroyed. It was unfortunate that American servicemen stationed there would also be killed in the attack, but it was unavoidable. Keefer intended to compensate their families generously for their sacrifice.

  Nuclear weapons would be used on a limited number of other population centers, but that was just for efficiency. Every conventional smart armament with a receiver would explode simultaneously on six continents and in space. Airplanes would fall from the sky. Ships would ram themselves into the shoreline and submarines would sink into the depths of the oceans and never return to the surface. Biological agents, those that could be counted on to tear through a population but die out on their own, would be released into the air.

  But none of this was really necessary based on the models. Just the act of cutting electricity and communication permanently across the globe was enough to send almost the entire seven billion into a death spiral. Food supplies ran out in days. Panic and looting happened almost immediately. As social order broke down, disease took out whole swaths of the population.

  Everything was connected. Even simple gas-powered generators had sensors that would receive instructors to fry their circuit boards. Outside of equipment that was thirty or forty years old, overnight the world would be reduced to candles and sending communication by handwritten note. No refrigeration meant food stores would rot within a week. The great desalination plants around the world, the only reason billions of people didn’t die of thirst, would go silent and never start again.

  The world without power was a world that turned on itself and died.

  The bombs and diseases Keefer would release were actually a mercy, hurrying along the inevitable and minimizing the suffering.

  He was so lost in his images of the world as he would create it, a world defined by the only country left intact after the devastation, that he didn’t notice until too late the movement to his side.

  He grunted as the sheriff smashed into him with a lowered shoulder, picking him up off the ground and driving him backward.

  He felt the sting of bullets as the drones opened fire, hitting both of them.

  As he fell to the ground, the sheriff on top of him, landing blows to his face, he recognized letting the man live had been a mistake.

  That was the problem with Marines in general, and this one in particular.

  They never knew when they were beat.

  54

  Rick drove through the pain. Bullets smacked into his back, one after the other, feeling like pieces of burning shrapnel, but he kept hitting Keefer in the face. It wasn’t until 10,000 volts of electricity entered his body that he stopped swinging.

  His body arched and he fell to the floor next to Keefer, jerking from the Taser. The flow of electricity went on for what seemed like a full minute. He knew from previous experience that it’d likely been only a fraction of that time, but that didn’t make it any less painful.

  Once it stopped, every inch of his body felt like it was on fire. Then, in a blast of pain, he felt the spots on his back where the drones had pumped bullets at him. He was just glad his calculation had been correct that the drones wouldn’t risk Keefer’s life, and had selected rubber bullets from their arsenal. They may have technically been nonlethal, but they sure hurt like hell. Seeing Keefer’s bloody face as he stood up took some of the edge off, but not much.

  Keefer wiped his mouth and nose with his sleeve. He grinned at Rick, his teeth coated with blood. “That wasn’t smart,” he said slowly.

  “But damn if you didn’t deserve it,” Rick said.

  Rick chanced a quick glance down the length of beds. Seconds earlier he’d spotted Cassie running from the cavern on their left and cutting straight through the main cavern close to the back, far wall. She’d been wearing a black jumpsuit and her hair was cut short to her scalp, but one look and he’d known it was her. She was alive, but more important, she was moving with purpose. He’d known right away that he couldn’t let Keefer see her, so he’d made his move.

  Breaking the man’s nose was just an added bonus.

  Two soldiers ran out from inside the lab. Rick groaned when he saw one of them was Estevez.

  “What are you doing here?” Keefer said. “You’re supposed to be in the control room.”

  Estevez was taken aback by the question, but it didn’t last long. He didn’t bother to hide his anger. “What am I doing here? What are they doing here? Especially now?”

  Keefer stepped toward the younger man and Rick hoped for some kind of confrontation between the two. Anything to give Cassie more time.

  But Keefer didn’t argue. Instead, he nodded and put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “You’re right. I got what I wanted from him. Kill them. Kill all three of them.”

  Estevez looked satisfied. He waved a soldier forward and they grabbed Dahlia and Charlie roughly by the arms.

  “No!” Rick yelled, pulling against the strong hands holding him back.

  “Oh my God,” Dahlia cried as the soldier pulled her away. “No!”

  Charlie pushed his way forward, swinging his tiny fists at the soldier pulling his mother. The soldier backhanded him across the face and he fell to the
ground in a pile. Dahlia screamed.

  “Leave him alone,” Rick yelled.

  Dahlia threw her body over her son.

  “Not here, you idiots,” Keefer said. “Take them away.”

  The soldier bent down and scooped up a groggy Charlie, holding him under his arm like he was a bundle of firewood. He used his other hand to point his gun at Dahlia. “Come quietly or I’ll snap his neck right here,” the soldier said.

  “Rick?” she said.

  His vision blurred as tears stung his eyes.

  “Keefer, leave them alone,” he begged. “I’ll do anything you ask.”

  But Keefer was already walking back into the lab where the four original patients were hooked up. The drones followed him in, one on each side, obviously set on protection mode. The doors slid shut behind him once he was inside.

  Rick looked at Estevez, the man’s smug look confirming that the road was over. He didn’t see any way out. He’d given Cassie the best chance he could. He just prayed that she had an actual plan. He turned to Dahlia.

  “I love you,” he said. “I love you and Charlie so much.”

  Dahlia seemed to understand that he was saying good-bye. Tears covered her cheeks, but she stood up straight and wiped them away. If she was going to die, she was going to do it with her pride intact. He had never loved her more than at that moment.

  “I love you too,” she said. “And Charlie? I want you to be brave, all right? I want you to grow up and be a fighter, you understand me?”

  Charlie tried to squirm out of the soldier’s arms, but the man held him tight.

  “Dahlia, what are you––”

  She cut him off. “Will you do something for me?”

  “Anything.”

  “Take care of Charlie for me,” she said, her voice strong. “And, if you get a chance, kill that son of a bitch Keefer. He deserves it.”

  Too late, Rick realized she was the one saying good-bye. With a cry, she ran at the soldier in front of her, the one carrying Charlie. She jumped onto him, scratching at his face and eyes with her hands. The soldier didn’t see it coming. He dropped Charlie and fell to the ground with Dahlia on top of him. The gun went off twice.