“What?”
“We created the nanites to preferentially migrate to uranium and plutonium. To lend further credibility to the hoax, yes. But their real purpose wasn’t to infiltrate nukes to detonate them. It was to disable them.”
Desh’s eyes widened.
“Designing nanites to detonate nukes, to make a collection of uranium go critical, is a tougher challenge than you might imagine,” continued Kira. “I learned a lot about nuclear weapons while I was helping Ross develop the nanites.”
Desh nodded. He had discovered this as well. Kira had broken into classified government computers and studied nuclear weapons. But she had studied biological ones also. Why had this been necessary? “You studied biological weapons as well, didn’t you?” said Desh.
Kira nodded. “Impressive deduction,” she said in admiration, having no idea that it was not deduction. “Why reinvent the wheel? We needed to optimize the spread of the nanites. And the government has performed extensive modeling and analysis of the spread of pathogens as part of their defense against bioweapons.”
Desh couldn’t help but smile stupidly. She was doing it. She was putting endless and seemingly unrelated puzzle pieces together into a seamless whole.
“Anyway,” continued Kira, “as I said, designing nanites capable of detonating nuclear warheads would have been quite challenging. And designing nanites capable of cleaning up radiation and transforming the atmosphere even more so. But it turns out that designing them to render nuclear weapons impotent was fairly easy. A nuke requires uranium enriched to levels that are very difficult to achieve, using high science and endless ultracentrifugation. So if you introduce even small impurities into your enriched uranium, your nuke becomes a door stop.”
Desh knew this was absolutely the case. “So was Matt in on the plan from the start as well?” he asked.
“That’s right. He was a key player also. It may be difficult to detonate a nuke using nanites, but it’s impossible to tap into alien nanites, running alien software, and get anywhere. But we played a magician’s trick. Matt did so much that seemed impossible while on the Copernicus, by the time he finished his act, even the most jaded scientists would believe anything he did was possible. And Matt wasn’t tapping into alien nanites to try to figure them out. He helped to build them in the first place. Using code that he developed while enhanced to look alien and to be incomprehensible to a normal mind. So he knew exactly how to get the nanites to disgorge the fake end-of-the-world scenario. Because he had implanted it. The timing between his discovery of the nanites’ evil purpose and time zero was carefully planned. Much longer and the story would have leaked before they could be stopped, which would have been a disaster.” She shook her head sadly. “Enough people died around the world from panic and riots during this fiasco as it was.”
Desh was finding it hard to get his arms around the enormity of what Kira had done. “So just to be clear,” he said, “are you telling me that every nuclear weapon on earth is now disabled?”
“Every one,” she replied proudly. “Eventually, my hope is that the nations of the world will disarm them anyway. When the species has gained back some sanity.” She paused. “In the meantime, of course, governments can’t know they’ve been disarmed.”
“Why not?”
“If a psychopathic killer has a gun, better to fool him into loading it with blanks than to steal it. If you steal the gun, he’ll just get another one. With blanks, he’s clueless until he’s ready to massacre a campus. Then his gun doesn’t work. But his attempt still manages to attract the police.”
“You’ve been thinking about this metaphor for a while haven’t you?”
“Maybe,” allowed Kira with a smile. “We’ve set the fictitious arrival of the alien armada to give an entire generation of humanity a chance to see themselves as a single species,” she explained. “Fighting a common enemy.”
Desh frowned. “But you’ve also condemned an entire generation to fear the skies. To fear the approach of doomsday.”
A guilty look crossed Kira’s face. “I know. In my defense, the plan wasn’t mine. Transcendent Kira made the calculation that the negative consequences couldn’t be helped. That if this wasn’t done, not enough people would fear the approach of doomsday—ensuring we brought it on ourselves within ten years.”
Desh tilted his head in thought as the van accelerated briskly. Griffin was probably on the onramp to a highway, heading for the nearest woods. “You said that when you were at the second level, you implanted three scientific breakthroughs into your normal mind. One involved ZPE, and one involved nanites. Did I miss the third?”
Once again Kira gazed at him with unabashed admiration. “Nice to see you’ve been paying attention,” she said playfully. “The third breakthrough was the principle behind a gravitational wave detector. Ross had a scientist on his team take the credit for this discovery, which, as you know, has revolutionized cosmology. He had to time its release just right. If this technology was available when he launched the fake alien ship, someone might have detected it on its outbound journey—which we couldn’t have. So he programmed the craft to hang out in interstellar space while the technology was adopted, so that it would be detected on the way back. It was critical for the entire world to know the alien ship was on its way. So the existence of advanced aliens would be hammered into the world’s consciousness like a spike. And with enough advanced warning so the nations of the world would band together to prepare. The Copernicus was perfect.”
Desh smiled appreciatively. “Your alter ego thought of everything.”
“Being nearly omniscient has its advantages,” said Kira wryly. “But believe me, she didn’t think of everything.”
“Wait a minute,” said Desh as a new thought occurred to him. “Does this mean that Madison Russo is on Ross’s team?”
“Great deduction, but actually no. We had to be sure the alien ship was discovered, and we did choose out someone on Ross’s team for that purpose.” She shook her head. “But Madison Russo beat him to the punch by five or six hours. Surprised the hell out of us. And it was a setback, if only a minor one.”
“Why?”
“We knew whoever discovered the ship would be a part of the international effort to study it, and we wanted a few more of our people on Copernicus.”
“A few more?”
“We had three others. The Copernicus tapped the best and the brightest. The same group of people Ross was tapping.” She shook her head. “But we decided not to use them. It wasn’t required, and again, everything was on a need to know basis.” She paused. “We had only one chance to get this right.”
“It seems to me the plan had a fatal flaw. You were lucky it all worked out, but what if you hadn’t been able to place Matt as the head of the nanite team? What if Jake hadn’t called you? Or hadn’t conceded to Matt’s demands to work on Copernicus?” Desh paused in thought and a troubled look came over his face. “Wait a minute. Does this mean you’re responsible for Jake coming after us in the first place? Because you knew he’d end up being part of the international effort?”
She laughed. “Not even transcendent Kira is that good. No plan survives engagement with the enemy. That’s why she set a hidden personality as a watchdog of the plan, knowing she’d have to face curveballs she couldn’t foresee. Believe me, the plan proceeded anything but smoothly. There were a whole host of disasters transcendent Kira didn’t foresee. Van Hutten came from totally out of left field. Frey was an unexpected nightmare. So were Jake and his organization.” She lowered her eyes. “So was Jim Connelly’s death,” she added sadly.
Desh thought back to that moment in the woods, when Connelly had sacrificed himself for Kira, without hesitation. He had wondered then if his friend’s sacrifice had been worth it, and now he knew that it had been.
“The hidden part of me recognized there was a chance Jake would be assigned to the international effort to study the alien object,” continued Kira. “That’s why I planted
a seed with him to call me if he ran into something big he couldn’t handle. At the time, I was a prisoner, and I was kicking myself, wondering why I had said it.”
In retrospect, thought Desh, it wasn’t entirely surprising that Jake was tapped to be part of Copernicus. He reported to Dutton, who was Frey’s puppet. And Frey would want to be sure he was represented on the luxury cruise ship. He had no way to know what alien secrets might be found, so he would want his proxies to have a front row seat. Still, Kira couldn’t possibly have counted on this complex web. “But it was just dumb luck that it all worked out,” he pointed out. “Dumb luck that you had planted the seed. And dumb luck that Jake was tapped to join Copernicus?”
“Not at all. If Jake wasn’t on Copernicus, we’d have had some of our people try to institute a contest to decide who ran the nanite team. If that failed, Matt could just contribute from Kentucky. Remember, anyone could study the nanites. They were everywhere. It wouldn’t have taken long for Matt to make more progress than anyone else in the world and establish his credentials. He would have ended up on the Copernicus no matter what. It just would have taken longer. But that wouldn’t have mattered. Because time zero wasn’t real. He programmed time zero to be five or six hours from whenever he had the nanites reveal their true purpose. Which he wouldn’t do until he had established himself on the Copernicus.”
Desh thought back to his friend’s activities on the massive cruise ship and shook his head in wonder. “Matt’s performance was flawless,” he said. “Truly genius. The big guy should win an Academy Award.”
“I have no doubt,” said Kira proudly. “Although he really was enhanced when you thought he was. That’s one thing that can’t be faked. And he needed to impress everyone enough to believe he was orders of magnitude beyond them. But he had the hardest job of all. You and I didn’t know what was going on—well, half of me didn’t. The two halves only became fully integrated again once the news hit that we had pulled it off. But Matt knew the truth from the beginning. And most of the time he had to keep us both in the dark. Although on the infrequent occasions when my other half took over, he was able to confide in me then.”
Desh knew he now had the entire story. Not that there wasn’t more to discuss. But it all fit so beautifully together. Kira’s plan was like a work of art—an exquisitely designed watch.
Desh unbuckled from his seat as he contemplated the true enormity of what had been accomplished. A herd of elephants had just stepped off his chest and the relief was indescribable. He turned to the woman he loved—who he had been right to still love—and tears began to run down his face. The emotional pressure of the end of the world, which he, like the masses, had absolutely believed, combined with believing he had been betrayed by a woman he loved with every fiber of his being, finally ended.
He felt euphoric.
He leaned forward and held his wife for several minutes, and tears began streaming down her cheeks as well. Finally, the embrace ended, and they kissed each other passionately, tasting a hint of the salty tears that had run down their lips as they did. Finally, Matt Griffin unknowingly ended their embrace when he applied the van’s brakes fairly suddenly, probably at a stoplight, and Desh was thrown to the right, almost tripping over the still unconscious Ross Metzger.
Desh took this as a signal to return to his seat and buckle in once again.
Kira let out a heavy sigh while he clicked the belt into place. “I’m so sorry I had to put you through this, David,” she said. “But transcendent Kira made that choice. After that there was nothing I could do. She put the clueless half of me through a lot of turmoil as well.”
Both of their tears had stopped flowing, but they were now on the giddy side. Desh gave her a lopsided smile. “So you only found out about all this yourself when you knew Matt had succeeded?”
“Yes. It was quite a shock, I can tell you. Memories that had been walled off, memories of actions I’d taken but didn’t know about, came rushing back to me like a dam had burst. First I was stunned. Then I was actually pissed at myself for keeping it from me. And finally, I was euphoric. It had worked. Nuclear weapons had been disabled and global tensions were about to recede rather than advance. Hopefully becoming a thing of the past forever.” She gazed lovingly into Desh’s eyes once again and smiled. “But what made me the happiest was knowing I could finally tell you about the plan. As an integrated personality again. That we would be back together the way we had always been, before the plan put a strain on our relationship.” Her jaw tightened. “But I never suspected Dutton would have the audacity to whisk you and Matt off Copernicus long before the dust had cleared.”
Desh nodded. He had to admit that Dutton had done a good job of justifying the need for Matt to leave the ship immediately.
“When Jake called I was frantic,” continued Kira. “It was supposed to be time to finally celebrate. Not to be fighting for our lives once again.”
“Well, you came up with a brilliant strategy to get us back.”
“Which couldn’t have gone more wrong,” noted Kira.
“You made the mistake of thinking that Eric Frey would be rational. Matt’s story about the scorpion and the frog was exactly on target. But your plan to get us back was still brilliant. Like you said, it still would have worked, despite Frey’s ambush, if he wouldn’t have added hidden snipers to the mix. There’s paranoia and then there’s ridiculous.”
“Well, given everything that blew up in our faces in the last month, figuratively and literally, there is a silver lining. Jake is now on our side. When we get back to headquarters, and Matt has recuperated a little longer, he can restore Jake’s good name. Undo the evidence Dutton planted against him, and replace it with evidence against Dutton.”
“When you say Jake’s on our side, what does that mean? That he’ll stop hunting us or actively help us?” At minimum, Desh was hopeful this would mean Seth Rosenblatt’s family could return to their lives, along with the rest of his hexad.
“Actively help us. He practically loves you and Matt. I don’t know what happened on the Copernicus but he raved about you both. I think he went from trying to kill the two of you to being willing to take a bullet for the two of you.”
Desh paused to let this soak in. “Will you tell Jake the truth about the aliens?”
“No. No one can ever know. Ross, Matt, me, and you. That’s it. At least for the next thirty or forty years. Hopefully someday the world will be more enlightened and we can think about revealing this as a hoax.”
Desh’s thoughts turned to Kira’s encounter with van Hutten. “Anton kidnapped you because the alien ship was on its way. This was what finally tipped the scales for him. So when he had you in a straightjacket, weren’t you tempted to tell him the truth?”
Kira shook her head. “I didn’t know it myself at the time. My hidden personality monitoring the situation didn’t see the need to fill me in. The plan was too important to jeopardize by disclosing to anyone who didn’t need to know, including me. Even when my life might have been on the line.”
Desh digested this sobering thought. “But what if you had been killed?”
“At that point the plan still would have succeeded. Matt and Ross would have seen to that.”
Desh considered this. She was right. At that point she truly was expendable. Thank God it hadn’t come to that. “And Jake is really willing to help us?”
“Wholeheartedly. He’s well aware of the power of a boosted IQ, and sees us as the good guys for once. Not to mention, the best chance to prevent Armageddon, round two, in thirty-four years.”
“Does he want to join the group?”
“No. We’re far better off leaving him in place. He and his black-ops team will act as our clandestine security arm. And he’ll make sure we get support from the highest levels of government. When he tells them that the great and powerful Matt, who now has a godlike reputation, is just an average one of us, they’ll realize we’re the best hope for Earth in the coming alien war.”
> “Right,” said Desh with a broad grin. “The coming alien war.”
“Instead of killing ourselves engaging in cloak and dagger activities to disguise what we’re doing, we can be much more aboveboard. We can’t be crazy about it, but we won’t have to stress as much.”
“But we’ve talked about having the government involved before,” noted Desh. “And we’ve always decided this would be a bad idea.”
“But now everything is different,” explained Kira. “I’m letting Jake continue to think the longevity therapy doesn’t exist. So no one will be after that. And with the alien threat looming, the government will leave us alone. We can come up with a story that we have to screen potential recruits for genetic compatibility with the therapy. That anyone not compatible will die if they’re enhanced. So if someone in power tries to force himself on us, we can play that card.”
Desh gazed at her in admiration. She had given this a lot of thought.
“And we’ll have Jake’s full support,” she continued. “We’ll be known at the highest levels of government as having saved the planet and working to do so again.”
“Okay, I can see your point. This will definitely be a great help. But let me get back to the big picture for a moment. I agree that transcendent Kira’s plan will get us all working together against a common threat. And that global tensions will be significantly reduced. And I get we won’t have active nukes anymore. But doesn’t it trouble you that the entire world will be working on even more powerful weapons? Weapons powerful enough to stop these fictitious aliens?”
“Transcendent Kira considered this carefully,” she replied. “Yes, new weapons will be developed, but mankind will be on the same team. And strategists will realize immediately that weapons and defense aren’t the answer, anyway. That speed and maneuverability are. A planet is the ultimate sitting duck, especially when you’re trying to protect it from ships capable of moving at light speed, and able to arrive from any direction. The real answer is faster-than-light travel. We need to be able to meet the alien threat as far away from Earth as possible.” She grinned. “Well, if the aliens actually existed, that is. We’d need to destroy them in interstellar space before they could get close to us. Strategists will realize that only faster-than-light ships—controlled by an artificial intelligence, and ramming the aliens, kamikaze style—will allow us to defeat the, um . . . fictitious enemy.”
AMPED w-2 Page 34