Well, that was inevitable. I looked back, and the pug-nosed guy was sprinting in my direction while the tall guard jumped into a Humvee. I sped up as the truck roared to life and barreled toward me, the Asian guy glaring daggers from behind the wheel while the other guard barked into his radio. I was just a couple hundred feet from the tree line, but the truck was gaining.
One hundred feet.
Fifty.
A gunshot rang out.
“Oh, shit,” I muttered, then used all my newfound strength to speed into the woods. I heaved the bike up the slope where the forest began as another shot sprayed dirt beside me.
Go. Go. Go.
I reached the trail, out of sight of the truck, as I heard shouting from below. A maniacal laugh erupted out of me as I peeled down the path at top speed.
When I was sure I wasn’t being followed, I stopped and plucked the mini iPad from my pocket. Miraculously, the screen hadn’t locked; it still showed the list of names through which the guard had been scrolling. I thumbed down the list, the names appearing in no discernible order. But one popped out at me:
JORDAN CONNERS—“RHO”
Next to it: CAPTURE ALIVE AND DELIVER TO ALPHA.
CHAPTER 36
Maggie
MY FIRST THOUGHT was that a motorcycle was speeding way too fast down my little street, but as I stood in front of my house, I realized the noise was wrong—too soft, more of a bzzzzzz than a vrrrrroom. Then I saw who was atop the bike, his legs pedaling furiously. Jordan screeched the brakes, the bike stopping inches from my feet. I didn’t flinch.
“Okay, you’re speedy,” I said.
“Damn straight,” he said with a smile that appeared and disappeared like a handclap. “Let’s go in back.”
He wheeled the bike around my house, and I followed.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Go out front again and see if anyone’s coming.”
“Yes, sir,” I said with a salute. I looked up and down the street, which was quiet and empty. “All clear,” I said as I returned to find him clutching a small tablet.
“I assumed they’d arrest me or at least take me back to the plant after what I did today, but they could’ve easily had someone waiting for me here, and they didn’t.”
The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “Wait, what did you do, Jordan? Was this after you met with the coach?”
He gave me a “Get real” look. “I didn’t meet with the coach. I went back to the plant—”
“Oh, shit.”
“—and they shot at me—”
“Oh, shit.”
“—but I’d already gotten this”—he held up the mini iPad—“and this.” He pulled out the BB-8 flash drive I’d given him.
“What’s on those?” I asked.
“Answers.”
I took that in. This was major.
“But wait,” I said, “they shot at you?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “They missed.”
I thought we could go inside the house, but Jordan didn’t want to be there in case the police or military or whoever came knocking. Instead, I popped inside to fetch the laptop, and we walked to a tiny wooden garden shed at the back of our yard. As we approached it, I noticed some new little cuts and a scabby gash on his arms.
“What happened there?” I asked, nodding at the wounds.
“No biggie,” he said, not breaking stride. “Got into another fight.”
“Another fight? Jordan, what’s going on with you?”
He stopped and turned toward me. “Not that I’ve picked any of these fights, but just so you know, this one was with a boar.”
“I don’t care how boring someone is, Jordan. You’ve got to stop with the fights! Did this bore have a sword arm, too?”
Jordan took each of my hands into his, looked into my eyes, and said softly, “Maggie. It didn’t have a sword arm. It had a snout. Because it was a boar—the animal kind.”
“Oh, a b—”
“Yeah, and it charged me, so I punched it out.”
He showed me his knuckles, which were red and cracked.
“Well, I guess that’s one way to handle it,” I said. “I mean, if you’re super strong and all.”
“Seriously, we should go back and pick it up because I tenderized the hell out of that meat,” he said. “I could make a deeply flavored ragout.”
He opened the shed door. We had to move a few hoes and shovels onto the lawn just to squeeze inside, and the hot, damp, old wood made it feel and smell like a sauna.
“Really, if you wanted to get in close quarters with me, there are easier ways,” I said.
He gave me a long look as we sat hip to hip, our knees bent. Would this be our moment? He smiled and gave his head a vigorous shake.
“If I tried to kiss you now, a meteorite would come crashing down, and then we’d be trying to get to the hospital while still not knowing about Ishango.”
“Beats projectile vomiting.”
“That’s a point.”
“And who said I’d let you, anyway?”
He pulled his head back as if taking me in anew. “Well, okay, then.”
Jordan handed me the flash drive, and I plugged it into the laptop. Up popped a folder listing files, many with indecipherable names, and the ones we opened contained technical information that we couldn’t fathom.
“Wait,” Jordan said. “That.”
“‘Lowdown’?” I asked, reading the file name at which he was pointing.
“Dad told me that when he was a kid, he kept a journal called the Lowdown, and every time something significant happened, he’d say, ‘Gotta add this to the Lowdown.’”
We clicked on it, and sure enough, it was some sort of diary as well as a timeline.
“Holy shit,” Jordan said as he scrolled through it.
It appeared to be the history of Ishango.
CHAPTER 37
Excerpts from “Lowdown”
I HAVE WORKED at the Mount Hope Nuclear Power Plant for 18 years. It was the first job I had out of college. It was a good job. I had no idea how long I would stay here. I had no idea that I would feel like I could not leave. I had no idea how much my job and the world and my conception of what is and is not possible would change.
Even after working here for many years, I have yet to hear who created Ishango or when exactly she was born. No one asks. No one tells. As far as anyone is concerned, she has always existed and just keeps growing.
Yes, Ishango is a she. Not a he. Certainly not an it.
Was she around before the CDC 6600, generally considered the world’s first supercomputer? I would think not, but I also would not be surprised if she were.
I know this: The plant opened in 1975. Ishango predates that. The plant was built to run Ishango. Powering the region’s electrical grid became a side benefit, done with a small fraction of the energy not needed for Ishango. Two thousand three hundred and fifty megawatts of electricity are directed not to the town, not to the region, not to the state, but to Ishango.
Crazy. How could a computer require so much energy?
No one here refers to Ishango as a computer or a supercomputer. Ishango is, simply, Ishango.
In the early days, Ishango was a problem solver. She sped through whatever equations we threw at her. We were aware of the other supercomputers out there. People would drop the names Cray and Atlas and Paragon and Fujitsu’s Numerical Wind Tunnel. These were the machines vying for supremacy from year to year, decade to decade. The Cray-2 of the 1980s featured four vector processors. The Japanese supercomputers of the 1990s boasted thousands of processors. Ishango’s number of processors increased exponentially over time. I could not attempt to put a number on it now—more zeros than anyone could count.
Yet Ishango is unknown, an incognito player on the supercomputer battlefield. She has remained under the radar.
The Japanese K computer was declared to be the world’s fastest in 2011.
It never went up against Ishang
o.
As we worked with Ishango, fed her information, streamlined her connections, increased her processing capacity, she grew faster. And faster. This is how technology works. Everything speeds up, by design.
But soon Ishango was speeding up with no design. She was doing so all on her own, and the complexity of her problem-solving was expanding at an astounding rate.
The programming team congratulated itself. It was “winning” AI, as they liked to say. They still thought they were programming Ishango.
They did not notice that at some point it became the other way around.
I do not know any other way to say it than this:
Ishango has a will.
When people think of AI, they think of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are many theories as to why HAL turns against the crew of Discovery One, the spacecraft bound for Jupiter. One popular notion, as advanced by Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, which was published after the film’s release, is that the HAL 9000 model is designed to be infallible, so when this HAL is ordered to lie to the crew—to deal in untruths—he cannot handle this incongruity and malfunctions.
I never have been tremendously interested in why HAL becomes motivated to kill everyone in the crew but Dave Bowman. What always nagged at me is why HAL fails to kill Dave as well. Dave represents an existential threat to HAL and thus the mission. Dave takes a pod outside the spaceship and forgets his helmet. HAL operates every aspect of the ship. Why cannot HAL shut down Dave’s pod or eliminate its flow of oxygen? Why doesn’t HAL make it impossible for Dave to reenter the spaceship manually? When Dave is blasted back into the air lock, why doesn’t HAL disable the mechanism that allows Dave to shut the door to outer space? Why doesn’t HAL cut off the air that depressurizes the room and allows Dave to breathe again?
If HAL were Ishango, Dave would have been dead.
The word “sentient” does not normally apply to computers.
It does with Ishango.
Ishango has ambitions. That is another word not often associated with computers. But Ishango has designs that go beyond being faster and more powerful than other machines. The plant’s technical team used to input commands to Ishango. Now Ishango does the commanding, and we are the parallel processors working at her behest.
I would love to say that we are doing this voluntarily, but I can see that this is not the case. Ishango is in control now, has been for some time. Her reach continues to grow.
The scope. It never fails to surprise me. When I think I have it figured out, I turn out to be wrong. Ishango imagines more than any of us.
More than anyone ever.
The animals.
My God, the animals.
Too close to home. I never thought.
My son.
My son.
Ishango lives. And intends to live.
CHAPTER 38
Jordan
I HAD TO stop reading. This was my dad? This was what was inside him?
What was that business about “My son? My son?”
What about me, Dad?
I glanced over at Maggie, and her eyes were big and full of concern.
“You okay?” she asked.
I shrugged.
She patted my thigh but didn’t leave her hand there. It was hot inside that garden shed, and a drop of my sweat splashed onto the keyboard. Maggie opened the door, and the breeze felt good. The yard was empty, and it would have been tough for anyone to see us sitting in the windowless shed anyway.
“I have a lot of questions, but one big one,” Maggie said.
“Yeah?”
“What does Ishango want?”
I sat silently for a moment but couldn’t process the question. “What do you mean?”
“It’s not a complicated question. What does Ishango want?”
“Why do you think it wants something?” I asked.
“She.”
“Why do you think she wants something? She’s a computer. Her needs are electricity, programming expertise, functionality, crash avoidance, and maybe some fancy desktop wallpaper.”
“Didn’t you just read your father’s journal?” she asked. “Ishango is sentient.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Your father wrote it.”
“He’s crazy, too,” I said, shaking my head with a scowl.
“He’s closer to this than you are,” Maggie said. “And he didn’t write this for an audience. He wrote it down maybe to keep himself from becoming crazy. This is his truth.”
“Given the amount of truth I’m getting from that guy these days, I’m not persuaded.”
“Look,” Maggie said with a sigh, standing up in the shed and stretching her arms out the door. “Everything sentient wants something. And those people at the plant, including your sword-arm dude, seem to be working toward some goal as well. So what is it? Does Ishango want to learn more? Does she want to annihilate humanity? Does she want to join the human race? What? Does? She? Want?”
I lifted my hands toward Maggie so she could pull me upright, and we stepped out into the dusk. “Hell if I know,” I said. “I’ll say this, though: Given all that’s going on, Ishango doesn’t feel like a force of good.”
“I wouldn’t dispute that,” Maggie said. “But what’s the goal, you think? How does Ishango live—and intend to keep living?”
I took a few steps toward the house, then turned around and walked back into the fields beyond the shed. “Safer this way,” I said, and took her hand. It was warm and clammy, and she curled her fingers gently around mine. “If Ishango is controlling people already, programming them, then in a sense she’s already living, no?”
“Perhaps. But perhaps she wants more. Maybe there’s a next step that everyone is working toward on her behalf.”
“And it involves me.”
“Or you’ve gotten in the way somehow.”
“Well, they want me captured alive for some reason. And I have my own special code name.”
“You may be right,” Maggie said, giving my arm a little swing as we stepped through some tall grasses.
“You may even believe me soon about Alpha and his sword arm.”
“Don’t push it.” She smiled at me. “So I don’t know whether this is relevant, but I remember reading in one of Mom’s magazines—from MIT, I think—about learning through experimentation. There was this scenario: Cars on the left side of a road were merging right while cars on the right side were merging left. When skilled stunt drivers were put behind the wheel of each car, they couldn’t pull off this maneuver. Yet computer simulators merged the cars together perfectly, even though no one had programmed them to do it. They figured it out, learned by experimenting.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m not sure that’s relevant.”
Maggie slapped the back of her hand into my chest. Ow. “Dummy, that’s what Ishango had been doing all these decades—playing simulation after simulation, over and over. And she has done a lot more than organize driving patterns. She has been growing increasingly self-aware and bending humans to her will. How? What and whom has she been experimenting on?”
I heard a rustle, stopped walking, and put my hand up, signaling Maggie to do the same.
“We shouldn’t be out here in the wild,” I said under my breath.
“It’s probably just a deer,” she whispered back.
“Even Bambi might be a killer here now,” I said, and turned around to walk quietly yet briskly back toward the house.
“The animals,” Maggie said. “Ishango has been experimenting on the animals.”
CHAPTER 39
Maggie
AMID A CACOPHONY of howling dogs in the kennels, I grabbed the plastic baggie off Mom’s office desk and took it into the exam room where the microscope was still out. This was after I saw her note: “I have a call in Woodside—a foal with thrush. I’ll be back late tonight.”
Ah, foals with thrush—a country vet’s work is never done. At least all these night calls were keeping her a
way from Bud Winkle.
Maybe Mom was relieved to make a relatively routine call after dealing with so many crazed animals. Over the previous day, frightened owners had dropped off five more hyper-aggressive dogs; that’s who was making the racket now. Mom was due to euthanize them all in the morning.
In the meantime, furious growls and barks aside, I was glad that Jordan and I had the place to ourselves.
Mr. Marsh had sent the baggie, which contained more stuff he’d found in the incinerator. Smart man that he is, he’d handed all this off to Mom after taking note of our interest in these objects. Inside were several small metal discs with thin wires extending out of them. They looked familiar; I thought I’d seen something like them when Jordan and I were scrolling through the files that he downloaded. Now Jordan was peering over my shoulder as I carefully shook the particles from the baggie onto the counter.
“What are those?” he asked.
“Would you want these inside your pets?”
“Nope. I wouldn’t want them inside me, either.”
“Hold on a sec.” I pulled out the laptop, reinserted the flash drive, and scanned the files until I hit one called PHASE II CEREBRAL CORTEX CONTROL IMPLANTS. That sounded right. It was dated October 13, 2008.
I opened it to find diagrams of discs similar to the ones on the counter, though each of these boasted more wire tendrils, like a dozen instead of four or five. The discs were labeled with weight and head-circumference-size ranges. The 2mm one was said to be the right dimensions for a medium-size dog.
“Well, that’s not creepy at all,” Jordan said.
“Let’s take a closer look at these babies,” I said, picking up one of the small discs from the counter. I cleaned it with compressed air, placed it onto a slide, and adjusted the microscope’s light to shine down on the metal piece rather than up from the bottom. I peered through the lens, focusing on the disc’s surface.
“They’re little hexagons, with ridges, and they look like they have connectors holding them together,” I said. “The wires are like rigid links.”
I stepped back to let Jordan take a look. He stared down the scope, using the little dials to move the slide back and forth.
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