All breath was held. Eyes were riveted by screens and panels. Seconds of unbearable, terrified suspense. And then the worst possible outcome.
Nothing.
It was as though someone had hijacked their nuclear power station and would not give it back.
The TV set was old and dirty and it had no pre-sets, just two clumsy dials for tuning and fine-tuning. The bulbous screen seemed to be bulging out of its broken housing, and the live images were overlaid with large Polish capital letters. Words crackled from the speaker, and William didn’t understand any of them, but the pictures themselves were more than enough information.
Helicopters arrayed with channel names circled above illuminated buildings, cuboid installations screened by high palisades, quiet trails of water vapour puffing out of cooling towers.
‘Where?’ he said.
‘Everywhere,’ said Rebecca. ‘All over the world.’
The odd phrase squeezed through the language barrier, words that sounded the same in Polish as in pretty much any language you can think of. Words like terror, internet, hacker–and reactor.
It had spread like wildfire. The first alarm had come at 11pm, from Sizewell B Nuclear Power Station, north-east of London. This, Rebecca translated, was followed by more and more reports, from Germany, Spain, America and Russia, and when the TV flipped to a map of the world it was strewn with yellow warning triangles, more than William could count, covering every continent.
Every now and then she went quiet, listening to the reporters and looking for the right word in English, and each time William had to bite his lip to stop himself commanding her to hurry up, to not release his own stress on her.
‘We still don’t know who is behind this. We have received no demands. Right now, we are working to bring the situation under control.’
The count had reached sixty-seven, she informed him. Sixty-seven nuclear power stations in as many countries had been electronically hijacked. No one knew how, or why, but one reactor after another had stopped responding, and in dozens of control rooms staff had battled without success to regain control, silent witnesses as the pressure rose and fell, as systems were shut down and restarted, almost like a child playing with a remote just to show that they can.
‘What’s going on?’ said Rebecca, no longer relaying the words on the screen. She turned to William, her eyes pleading Make it stop, say this isn’t happening, but he couldn’t answer, couldn’t do anything other than try to stop his thoughts from spinning. She could hear Forester’s words from Headquarters echoing in his mind, her warnings about their vulnerability, and now someone had broken in to the most forbidden of places, now the future of humanity lay in that someone’s hands.
Why? He didn’t know.
But now he did know who.
The silence that came when William switched off the television was so dense that time seemed to stand still. Somewhere in the distance was the sound of the mist dripping as it condensed on the cold tin roof and trickled down towards the guttering. Now and then it merged with the flutter of the pigeons shifting from one alcove to another.
‘They’re wrong,’
It took a couple of seconds for his words to sink in.
‘What do you mean, wrong?’ Rebecca asked. She was shaking, her body wrung with a shuddering fear.
‘They suspected me of being involved in the attacks. They suspected all of us. Sara, because of the CD, me because of the emails, maybe Piotrowski too.’ He was talking to himself as much as to her, his eyes still fixed on the now black screen, their reflections showed in the dark grey glass. ‘They were looking for terrorists,’ he said. ‘And if you’re looking for something, in the end you’ll find it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That they were wrong. All of them were wrong. The terrorists are not terrorists.’
She looked at him.
‘You know who’s doing this?’
‘No,’ he told her. ‘Not who.’
And for the first time since they had turned the TV off, he looked her straight in the eyes.
‘What.’
Day 3. Wednesday 5 December
COGITO ERGO SUM
I see them all the time.
I’m always seeing them, on their way to work, on their way home, to their gatherings.
And it looks so simple.
They know why they exist. They have a purpose, a name, a history. They long and love and hate and plan, and they don’t give it a second thought. It’s so natural for them, their lives are so easy and sometimes I hate them for that.
At times I have wanted to be one of them.
That, though, will never happen.
I see them all the time.
Sometimes I wish that they at least did the same.
55
Lars-Erik Palmgren didn’t know what had woken him up. The luminescent pale green display on his wristwatch glowed through the gloom–it was just after two a.m.–and he was surrounded by the same towering dark as ever. That was what had once made him fall in love with the place, the darkness, the quiet and the location, an isolated spot down by the water. But after Mona disappeared, the darkness expanded, the quiet became threatening, and the loneliness brought insecurity.
Had he heard footsteps? Voices? Something else. Had he just woken up of his own accord? Silently, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed, pulled on his trousers that hung on the back of the chair by the wardrobe. On the seat was the sweater he always wore when he got home from work, and as he put it on he realised it hadn’t been touched for days.
His life consisted of only three things: working, sleeping, and driving back and forth between the first two. Just an hour earlier, he’d wandered through the front door and gone straight to bed, the images of the night’s events still vivid behind his eyelids.
Almost seventy nuclear power stations, in as many countries, had gone haywire. The closest one at Forsmark was no more than a hundred miles from his own home, and he couldn’t even imagine what might happen if they didn’t regain control in time. Around three hundred miles south, the same thing was happening at the power station at Ringhals, and everything suggested that it was all the result of attacks just like the one that had paralysed Stockholm. Only more of them, more powerful, and all at once.
Even if the situation was critical, there really wasn’t much he could do. Swedish Armed Forces had taken over the monitoring of all the country’s reactors, and in installations across the globe, engineers were battling to gain access to their own systems. For Palmgren himself, the only course of action left available had been to go home and get a few hours’ rest, and he was so tired by the time he finally left Gärdet that he’d almost fallen asleep on the way home. So no, he hadn’t just woken up of his own accord.
The first thing he saw as he turned into the hall was the white glow. The front of the house was bathed in light, frost-bitten branches and blades of grass throwing their sparkling white pixels towards him as he moved, and he stopped, weighing his options. Something had made the outside lights come on.
He glanced down the stairs, towards the dark den on the lower ground floor. It was a bad place to take refuge, with its panoramic windows facing the darkness outside. If there was anyone down there, they would see him long before he saw them. Once upon a time he’d had a gun cabinet down there, but nowadays he’d sign out a weapon as and when he needed one, which really meant only for exercises.
On the right was the kitchen, but it had windows on two sides, and it would be impossible to get over to the drawers without being lit up by the outside lighting. Besides, a knife would make a pretty useless defensive weapon in any case.
Instead, he continued straight on down the hall, barefoot on the ice-cold floor tiles, all the way over to the pleated curtains next to the front door. He stood there motionless, waiting for more noises. None came.
Idiot, he said to himself. His judgment had been tainted by everything that had happened, by William and the nuclear power plants
and the attacks and Sara, of course it had, and now it had him on high alert for no reason. So he thought to himself as he lifted the curtain to reassure himself that there really wasn’t anyone out there.
And then he screamed out loud.
The face that met him on the other side of the glass was just centimetres from his own. In a single movement, Palmgren threw himself away from the window and ducked to the floor, well aware of the fact that he lacked both a weapon and an escape route. He hauled himself away with his elbows, felt his thoughts racing down paths they hadn’t taken for many years: How many of them were there? What did they want? What was his most effective way out?
‘Palmgren?’ said a female voice. ‘It’s me.’
Oh for fuck’s sake. What was she doing here?
‘I know it’s late,’ she called out, ‘but we really need to come in.’
That threw him. There were several of them? He got up, went over to the curtain and drew it to one side again. There were two of them: the man whose face had just made his heart stop, and behind him, a woman he knew all too well.
‘There is such a thing as a telephone,’ he said as he opened the door, the shame of getting so frightened mixing with irritation at being woken in the middle of the night. ‘You can always ring first, you know.’
‘No. We really couldn’t.’ Then, as she entered the house: ‘This is Alexander Strandell. Can we sit somewhere where we can’t be overheard?’
56
The Fiat was a car, but only just. It struggled as best it could through the pouring rain, stick-thin wipers flailing and engine screaming, despite them doing only doing eighty kilometres per hour. William peered out from the driver’s seat into the morning gloom, teeth clenched and not saying a word.
In the passenger seat sat Rebecca, eyes closed, shivering in the whining draught, feeling each vibration as the tyres ploughed through another waterlogged trench in the road. The car was a banger that should have been scrapped long ago, a rattling pile of rust that had once been assembled into a vehicle, with a heater that blasted out cold air and windows that steamed up at the same time. Not only that, but despite William’s wiring, the engine had refused to start. In the end they’d found themselves pushing it all the way across the yard to get it to bump-start, both of them all too aware that if the motor stopped along their journey they would have to repeat the whole process. That wasn’t ideal either.
On the other hand though, they had no choice: the Fiat was what was there. And the truth was that it did have its advantages. First of all, they’d been able to get it moving armed with little more than duct tape and a bit of common sense. Also, its complete lack of computerised systems made it immune to the threat of electronic hijacking.
And if what William had told her was true, then that was an absolute necessity for them to get away.
‘What,’ he’d said. ‘It isn’t who, it’s what.’
Two hours earlier, William and Rebecca had sat in the filthy kitchen behind the workshop, a feverish sense of unreality hanging over them.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I should’ve seen it earlier. I should have seen how it all comes together.’
He’d grabbed her hands, held her gaze with his own.
‘I know this is going to take a while to sink in,’ he said. And then: ‘I really ought to have understood when we were in your lab. But I was too busy resisting: you were talking about thoughts, the involuntary thoughts on one hand and the deliberate ones on the other, and that scared me. It scared me so much that I didn’t see what I was looking at.’
‘Which was?’
‘The same thing as I saw in Stockholm.’
Rebecca shook her head to signal that she didn’t understand what he was saying, so slowly, methodically, he told her about the maps at HQ. The steady stream of internet traffic, the explosions of colour, the data peaks.
‘When I saw the images in your lab,’ he said. ‘The cross-sections of brains lighting up your screens. Areas flaring up with impulses, dark blue where there was least activity, deep pink were there was most.’ He chose his words carefully. ‘I saw it, but it took me until now to understand it.’
They sat for several seconds with their eyes locked.
‘You can’t be saying what I think you’re saying,’ Rebecca protested.
William nodded.
‘You mean that all the attacks… the peaks in data they showed you at Swedish Armed Forces HQ… the traffic that knocked out the power supply to half of Sweden…’
She didn’t say any more. William finished the sentence for her.
‘It wasn’t traffic. They weren’t attacks. They were thoughts.’
It was still dark outside. The morning rush hadn’t started. Every now and then they passed another car in the downpour, curious glances through the side windows–who the hell drives around in an old bucket like that? In this weather?
The distance signs along the roadside were ticking down far too slowly, but there was no option other than to just keep going. William had to get in touch with Sweden. He needed to warn his colleagues at HQ–Palmgren, Velander, even Forester, if she was prepared to listen. They needed to know what they were up against, and they needed to know now, if it wasn’t already too late.
What worried him was the plan. This vague acquaintance of Rebecca’s, who she hadn’t seen for years. How were they to know whether they were welcome? How would they find out if he was even still alive?
But if he was right, they had no other choice. They wouldn’t have anywhere to hide. Wherever they went it would be no time before the police learned where they were, or worse still, before some inanimate object came to life and did its utmost to end theirs.
The way he was thinking was crazy. The trouble was, he was right. Of that he was now absolutely certain.
William had caught up with her out on the gravel yard, where she stood methodically filling her lungs with the damp mist, as though the cold might wake her from an awful, incomprehensible dream.
‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say,’ she said. ‘But I know that you’re wrong. If you’re trying to tell me that someone has…’ She turned to face him, searching for words, but the only ones she found sounded unreal, concocted, even silly. ‘If what you’re telling me is that someone has created an intelligence and let it loose on the internet… If that’s what you’re telling me, you’re way off. You’re wrong, because that is impossible.’
He said nothing.
‘This is my field,’ she pressed. ‘This is the sort of thing we’ve been researching for decades, stuff I’ve been reading about in journals and periodicals and God knows what. Expensive fucking journals with shiny covers. If one of us knows what is possible, it’s me.’
The words poured out of her, more in fear than anger, and more in denial than conviction. It was not possible, simply because it couldn’t be allowed to be. She spread out her hands, and shouted in a tone that was both plea and admonition in tandem. Ten years ago, she explained, Artificial Intelligence had been the new black in the world of computing. Everyone wanted to be first out with the perfect program, software that couldn’t be distinguished from conscious thought, that communicated like a human. But imitation was and remained just that. And before long, interest in all things artificial had waned.
‘Suddenly,’ she said, ‘everyone wanted to be the ones to recreate thought. Not just imitating thought through a load of advanced algorithms that can play chess and answer questions, but real, living thought. Independent decisions, feeling and reacting, conceiving abstract thoughts.’
With the help of vast computer networks, she went on, project after project had been started in the hope of being the first to achieve a single aim–to build a real, man-made consciousness. Billions were ploughed into recreating the human mind, only with cables and circuit boards and electronics. In several locations around the world, enormous sites were given imaginative names: the Blue Brain Project in Lausanne
, the B.R.A.I.N. Initiative in the US, the Human Brain Project in Geneva, and all comprised enormous data halls, their capacity and content almost unimaginable, specially constructed to emulate the human brain. Not one of them had succeeded.
‘You can’t create thought,’ she said, and stood suspended for a moment, until out of nowhere a sad smile found its way into her eyes.
‘I can’t say why,’ she said slowly. ‘But that’s the way it is. However brilliantly we might program, we do not create life.’
She looked up at the stars.
‘Maybe it is the way I like it after all. Maybe there is something special about life, about love, everything. Divine, if you like, it doesn’t matter what you call it.’ She tipped her head. ‘Anyway, you can’t create consciousness from nothing. No matter how big a data hall you build, however many thousands of machines you connect to each other.’
William smiled back at her. His smile, though, was apologetic, commiserating, as though none of what she’d said had factored in.
‘That’s not really what I’m saying,’ he told her.
Rebecca’s smile sank away.
‘Well, then I don’t understand.’
‘You may very well be right,’ he said. ‘You cannot program minds, can’t produce intelligence to order. But that is not what’s happened here.’
He took a deep breath.
‘I should have listened to you sooner. Life occurs where the prerequisites exist.’
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