AMPED w-2

by Douglas E. Richards

  Both facilities were within a thirty minute drive of a major airport, and had been located so that no one in the contiguous United States would be more than two or three hours flight away. They had taken a map of the United States, split it into equal east and west halves, and then tried to pick international airports in approximately the middle of each half that could be reached by direct flight from surrounding states. Denver International was the winner in the western half, and the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International airport held this honor to the east. The core counsel split their time between both facilities about equally, even though they considered the Denver facility to be their true headquarters.

  “Thanks,” said Desh. “We’ve put a lot of thought into this. Not to mention a mountain of money. The good news is that enhanced Matt is basically able to create money at will.”

  “Really?” said van Hutten, raising an eyebrow.

  Matt shrugged. “Just change a few pixels and bytes in computer systems around the world and your bank account never runs dry. There are safeguards and checks against doing this, but by removing relatively modest sums from thousands of the largest banks and businesses in the world, and overcoming the cross checks, it can be done. I also make sure all the accounting is fixed to show that those pixels and bytes never existed in the first place. So the money is never missed.”

  “Nice trick,” said van Hutten.

  “We try not to abuse it,” said Kira. “But we do go through, um . . .” she glanced at Griffin mischievously, “prodigious amounts of money. We contract out a lot of manufacturing and other work, which tends to be expensive, especially since we’re not the patient type. And doing things in a way to maximize security and cover our tracks takes even more money.”

  “What’s nice,” added Desh, “is that if you need something, or think an item might be of use to you, even in the slightest, all you have to do is ask.” He pulled out his cell phone. “Jim and I, for example, wanted phones that could survive a war, but that look like normal phones anyone would have. This is a ten thousand dollar phone, but it’s as rugged as it gets: military grade and fully submersible. I could use it to pound a steel spike into concrete and then check my messages.” He paused. “So don’t be shy. If you want something, we’ll get it for you.”

  Van Hutten nodded slowly. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he replied thoughtfully.

  “But back to the briefing,” said Connelly. “Recruits are organized in groups of six.” Individuals were placed in groups based on their collective proximity to one of the two facilities, but since they all thought only one facility existed, they were unaware of this. “You could think of these groups as cells. But since this word is usually used in connection with terrorists, we decided not to use it. We call them hexads.”

  “I see,” said van Hutten. “Like a triad. Except for six.”

  “Exactly,” said Kira. “On most days the members of a given hexad congregate here and take turns being enhanced. I dole out the gellcaps, which are meticulously accounted for. And there’s a scheduling program that ensures the hexads are always kept separate.”

  “We’re a bit on the paranoid side,” added Griffin.

  “Yeah, just a bit,” said van Hutten with a smile. “So however many recruits you have—which I’m sure you won’t disclose—each one only knows you four and the five other members of their hexad?”

  “Exactly,” replied Jim Connelly. “We ask recruits not to use their real names and not to attempt to identify each other.”

  “We also try to get single people like you with few attachments,” added Desh. “Just in case. If they are married, we prefer those without children. Or with grown kids who are on their own. We’ve mostly adhered to this, although we’ve had to make an exception in a few cases. If a hexad is compromised, this policy helps make it easier for them to go to ground. If this were to happen, anyone with a wife and kids would have it pretty tough. They’d have to join our equivalent of a witness protection program. For everyone else, given a worst case scenario, it would just be a simple matter of faking their deaths and then keeping them off the grid.”

  “Faking a death doesn’t sound like a simple matter to me,” said van Hutten.

  Desh smiled. “Well, we’ve gotten pretty good at it,” he said. “It’s our best trick.”

  There was a long silence in the conference room as the team let van Hutten digest what he had been told up to that point. Jim Connelly took the opportunity to politely excuse himself from the proceedings once again.

  Kira thought the aging physicist was holding up surprisingly well. They had escorted him on a few bathroom breaks during this marathon session, and they had taken a few themselves, but other than this they had plowed ahead relentlessly.

  Kira gestured at the pink faced physicist. “How are you feeling?” she asked. “We can take a twenty minute break if you’d like. We’re throwing a lot at you all at once. It must be like drinking from a fire hose.”

  Van Hutten laughed good naturedly. “I’m fine,” he assured her. “These are all once in a lifetime revelations, so I think I can keep my mind from wandering for a few more hours. What you have going here is truly remarkable. You’re like a well-oiled machine. With these kind of facilities, funding, and the kind of brilliance you can unlock with your therapy, utopia might not be a pipe dream after all.”

  Kira frowned. Van Hutten had hit a nerve. Utopia was a far more difficult concept to pin down than she had ever realized. Even if she could wave a magic wand to accomplish anything she wanted to, the issues just got thornier and thornier.

  What if you could magically invent ways to totally free up humanity, to mechanize all labor, to make the world so affluent there would be no need for anyone to work to make a living? Would this be utopia? Her study of the science of happiness indicated that this might actually be a disaster.

  Humans were worriers by nature. If a person’s mind wasn’t fully occupied they would find endless things to stress about. This trait allowed early humans to anticipate unseen and far future dangers, helping physically unimpressive hominids survive to become the dominant species on the planet. So while leisure and pleasure in moderation were good things, humans needed to be engaged in challenging activities, during which their attention was so utterly absorbed that there was no room for fear or worry or self-consciousness.

  Kira knew that contrary to popular belief, humans were happiest, not during lengthy periods of leisure, but when they were growing as people. When they were achieving. When they were striving to overcome difficult and worthwhile challenges, and then overcoming them. When they were feeding a sense of accomplishment and self-esteem through effort. Even the accomplishments of menial labor brought a sense of personal satisfaction far greater than most realized.

  Make your utopia too utopian and boredom would set in. And malaise. Some would continue to work hard and challenge themselves at every turn—even if all of their physical and financial needs were taken care of. But many more would fall into the trap of being lulled into a low energy state of endless leisure—and little true happiness. A state of dependence without any real sense of progress, or growth, or accomplishment. A slow poisoning of the soul of the species.

  Kira had become convinced that a true utopia was impossible for humans in their current state—no matter what the conditions.

  Desh threw her a glance, with an expression that told her he knew exactly what she was thinking and that he was about to take the reins of the conversation for a moment. They had discussed the human condition and utopian dreams at length, and were on the same page, although she didn’t expect him to get into any of this with van Hutten. He didn’t. Instead, he took the opportunity to bring the understandably euphoric physicist back to earth, a place he would need to be for the rest of their discussion.

  “Not to burst your bubble,” said Desh, “but while we have some pretty grandiose goals, things are not going nearly as well as we had hoped.” His expression darkened. “On a number of front
s,” he finished grimly.

  9

  Jake was minutes away from landing, but he wasn’t about to delay the operation just so he could have a ringside seat. Every minute was precious. Between one instant and the next he could lose the element of surprise. Miller and Desh could decide to leave. Anything could happen.

  And failing at this point would be unthinkable. To finally have found and cornered them and then squandered the opportunity would be the ultimate tease, far worse than never having found them at all.

  From the intel Rosenblatt had delivered, their organization was structured as brilliantly as he had expected. Six member cells, with each member discouraged from learning the identities of the others. Even so, from the descriptions and other clues Rosenblatt had given them, Jake was confident they would identify the other five members of the physicist’s cell—eventually.

  The structure of Miller’s group had the advantage that no cell had any knowledge of any other cell. But it had a critical flaw. While the cells had no connections to each other, each was connected to the hub. Which meant that each member knew the identities of the core leadership. Jake was surprised they had allowed this, but then again, given they were all legally dead and thought that no one knew of their existence, this arrangement should have been more than sufficient.

  And they had continued to exercise as much caution as they could. They had taken care to make sure that none of their recruits ever learned the address of their facility. Rosenblatt had described how each member of the group was always driven to the facility in the back of a van, with no way to see outside. More polite than asking guests to wear a blindfold, but with the same net effect.

  But Rosenblatt had known enough to lead them to the right place anyway. Miller had made one mistake. During one of the many updates she presented to Rosenblatt’s cell, which they called a hexad, she had thrown the wrong presentation up on the screen. It had only remained there for a few seconds before she caught her error, but it had been long enough. The slide had been entitled, Headquarters Building—Artist’s Rendering. An Icon of Denver International was shown at the bottom of the slide and their headquarters was depicted to the northeast. Its perimeter was nothing but large panels of mirrored glass, reflecting its surroundings. The structure was a perfect rectangle two stories tall, and judging from several trees drawn nearby, it wasn’t all that big; perhaps confining fifteen or twenty thousand square feet of space.

  They had been lucky. Without seeing this particular slide, Rosenblatt would never have known the approximate dimensions of the building or that the outer perimeter was mirrored, having no way to tell this from inside. Nor would he have known its position with respect to the airport.

  Once Jake knew the size and style of building they were looking for; one northeast of the airport and eighty yards from a massive warehouse, he had more than enough to go on. Marshalling the vast resources at his disposal, computer, satellite, and otherwise, his black-ops group had found it almost immediately, and Desh and Miller’s presence there had confirmed it.

  And now he was just minutes away from ending a threat unlike any other in history.

  Jake put in a call to his second in command. “The strike on Miller is now immanent. What’s the status of your search, Major?”

  “We’ve been working the computer guys hard,” replied Kolke. “We’re confident we’ve identified two members of Rosenblatt’s cell: the two who were the most physically distinctive.”

  “How confident?”

  “Extremely. Both are accomplished scientists. Not tops in their fields, but solid. One is at a university and one at a company. Beginning about six months ago, both began flying to Denver on a regular basis, something they had never done previously. Bank records indicate that both cashed five thousand dollar checks just prior to their first flight, which fit with what Rosenblatt said of the group’s MO.” The major paused. “While you were in route to Peterson, I alerted teams near their locations to ready themselves and await instructions.”

  “Good work, Major. Have them raid the homes and offices of these two as soon after we take out Miller as possible, placing a premium on stealth and discretion. At this time of the night your teams should be able to slip in quietly and not attract any attention. And I want the scientists treated as gently as humanly possible. No lethal force under any circumstances. Bring them back for questioning, and everything else you can get your hands on, with computers being the highest priority.”

  “Roger that,” said Kolke.

  10

  “Given the miraculous effects of Kira’s therapy,” said the Stanford physicist, “it’s not surprising you’d have some pretty far-reaching goals. So what do you have in mind?”

  “We’re thinking big picture,” replied Desh. “Very big picture. Immortality. A galaxy or universe spanning civilization. And ultimately, perhaps, a galaxy or universe spanning intellect.”

  “Wow, it’s too bad none of you are ambitious, or this could be an interesting group to join.”

  “Which is why inventing a killer shoot-em-up video game isn’t on the agenda,” complained Griffin. “In some parallel universe somewhere, the goals of this group aren’t quite so soaring, and I’m a superstar in the gaming industry. With beautiful women flocking all over me, I might add.”

  Van Hutten shook his head in amusement and then turned to Kira. “David mentioned immortality. I’m not a biologist, but do you really think this is possible?”

  “Yes. With enhanced intelligence, probably in the next fifty to one hundred years,” she replied. “While enhanced, I’ve managed to design a therapy that can double the span of human life. But biology and medicine alone won’t get us much farther than this. There’s a limit to how much you can do with the human organism. Along with neurologists, immortality will require enhanced physicists, roboticists, and computer scientists to find a way to transfer the precise quantum state of a given human mind to a more stable artificial matrix, in an artificial body. A mind that will be indistinguishable from the original down to the last spin of the last electron. Then all you’d need is to have your personality matrix automatically backed-up each night. The same way you do with your computer’s hard drive. So if your artificial body is destroyed, your mind can be automatically reinstalled in another one.”

  “Not a big believer in the soul, I take it?” said van Hutten.

  “Let’s just say I hope the soul is inherent in the complexity of the infinitely grand workings of the human brain. And that no matter where the mind is housed, the soul will follow.”

  “Poetically said,” acknowledged the physicist. “But issues of the soul are just the beginning. Do you know how many other thorny religious, ethical, and philosophical cans of worms this would open up?”

  Kira nodded. “So many it boggles the mind. Even the enhanced one. What is the meaning of life? How much are emotions a function of our neuronal circuitry and how much are they a function of hormones? Without an endocrine system, can we experience love? Can we experience any emotions? And if not, will we lose all drive and purpose? Will we still even be human?” She paused. “For those who believe in an afterlife, would this process rob us of this? Or would our original, organic selves, upon death, still go on to the afterlife, and look on in horror at the pale imitations of themselves running around the cosmos. And what would stop someone from loading thousands of copies of their mind into thousands of artificial bodies? And even if an identical copy of your mind was reborn the instant you died, the original you would still cease to exist. So is this even immortality?” She sighed. “And these questions only scratch the surface. I could go on all night.”

  “You obviously haven’t done any thinking about this,” said van Hutten with a broad grin.

  Kira laughed. “None at all.”

  The smile stayed on van Hutten’s face for several seconds before finally fading. “Growing up,” he said, “my favorite author was Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer. Have any of you ever read the short story The L
ast Answer?”

  There were blank stares all around, except for Kira, who nodded appreciatively. “I have to admit to being a science fiction geek,” she said. “Asimov was a bit dated when I grew up, but he was still a favorite. And this might have been his most thought provoking piece of all.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said van Hutten, obviously delighted to have found a fellow fan. “But for the benefit of those who haven’t read it, let me tell you a simpler story that makes a similar point, although not quite as interesting and thought provoking as Asimov’s.”

  Van Hutten gathered his thoughts for a few seconds and then began. “A guy dies and finds himself welcomed to the afterlife by a brilliant, all encompassing light; by an almighty being who tells him that he can now pursue his wildest dreams for all eternity. There are no rules. He can do whatever he wants. And he can travel anywhere in the universe in an instant. For the first ten thousand years or so the guy is having the time of his life. But after a million years, he’s got the been there, done that syndrome. He’s bored out of his mind and weary of the burden of consciousness. So he finds the almighty being and asks that his existence be ended. But he’s told that this is the one thing that isn’t possible. So he goes off for another billion years. Finally, he’s so fatigued, so bored, that he begs for his existence to be ended. And once again he’s told this isn’t possible. ‘Well if that’s the case,’ he says angrily, ‘then I’d rather be in hell.’ To which the almighty being, from deep within the all-encompassing light, replies, ‘Where do you think you are?’”

  There was silence around the conference room for several seconds.

  Kira finally nodded and said, “It’s a fascinating point. Seems like there is no perfect world. All I can say is that at least future immortals will be able to end their own existence if they choose to. And maybe boredom and weariness from the drudgery of existence is only a factor of our limited intellect and perspective. Or our endocrine system. It’s possible the enhanced mind won’t have any problem with eternity.”