He did it again, excitement growing. The chunk swivel-popped free. This wasn't a natural fissure; it was definitely man-made. He hunted for something in the new space—but found only rock. He had no time for a goose chase. Not now. Desperation overwhelmed him, the fight against the bots' venom all-consuming.
He couldn't concentrate. Not anymore. He needed help.
—Sarah . . .
There was only the trickle of loss, splashing her like Chinese water torture. Sarah swam through an all-pervading darkness. Then, a word. Her name, slamming into her consciousness through the drone link.
—Ryan?
She pushed the thought through slow-spun static. Memory fade consumed her. Anger had melted into a suffocating depression. Laing cut into that haze.
—I need help.
—Ryan, I can't. I've got nothing left.
—Sarah . . . please.
—Just let it go. I'm not worth it.
In darkness, she pulled into herself, the crush of her knees into her chest as far from her as Ryan himself.
But Laing pushed. He always pushed. He loaded the Kryptos data in a single spew that sent Sarah reeling. She tried to grasp it—finding that she was starving for stimulation.
She knew about the sculpture. All hackers did. One of the very few mysteries remaining. Something in her pulled out of black depression. The simple drive to solve the puzzle filled her.
—The compass, Ryan. North isn't north, right?
It took Ryan some time to decipher her question.
—You're right. Points southwest.
—Okay.I . . . She trailed into a wash, the drain overwhelming.
—Sarah!
—Yes.Okay.You said you got there using the standing waves in the pool. So maybe this uses a similar physical constant—a secret within the physi - cal world.
—Sarah, I need clarity here. I'm getting eaten alive. Literally.
—The slab itself. I think it's magnetized. Removing the piece changed its field strength.
—Jesus, you're right. Magnetic shift. I can read it with the drones.
—Okay, take the compass needle as straight north, then adjust by the magnetic shift of the slab. That's your north. The last code is ...It's...Oh, God, Ryan. I can't hold it.
—Sarah, please.
—The fourth part of the cipher—it's a distance. With your new north, use it.
Silence. It sank through her, radiating into a black cosmos. Desire floated through that darkness, the raw needs that wouldn't die with her memories. But they evaporated so quickly, lost to the ebb, like sand pulled into the ocean by a receding wave.
—I found it, Sarah. I'm coming for you.
A wave of excitement shot through her, but that too quickly faded to black.
.....
Ryan stumbled from the forest, bots latched to him, boring deep. His face was raw fire, arms and legs dead. He pushed—his entire effort going into a single step, then another, and another.
He gazed through haze-puffed eyes at the blur of Frank and Madda before him.
Each step was torture, each a world in itself. And suddenly, he was free. Beyond the bots' cordon, the swarm released. Laing stumbled through soft grass. Madda and Frank caught up to him.
“Christ, Ryan. That's some ghoulish shit.” Dave couldn't tear himself from Laing's face. That look, combined with the inner slither of drone work, told Ryan that the bots had done serious damage. Pain radiated through him in electric arcs.
“Good news is, you're gonna live,” Frank said. “Bad news is—you're gonna live.”
Ryan toppled into Madda's arms. From his hand fell a tarnished copper disk.
41
Dreams pulsed through him. A swirling barrage of images. Slowly, the mass condensed around him, contracted like a black hole crushing space. So much information, compacted to a single form.
It was full-view perception. The push and pull of human interaction flowed through Ryan. The vision ran wide, pushing larger and larger.
He saw not just the world, but the patterns underlying it. He saw how they fit together to make a larger image. And he saw that they could be broken.
The entirety of human knowledge flooded him. And still he drew more. Constantly sucking, an unending desire, all information distilling into a pattern he could almost resolve.
It was too much. Ryan reeled. Terror welled in him. He shook, bucked against it, and finally—broke free.
Ryan woke up screaming.
THE MERCY, HOSPITAL AIRSHIP
“Laing,” Frank said. “You have to calm down. You're okay.”
Ryan tried to orient himself—to still his breathing and regain a lock on reality. The dream continued to haunt him. If that's what it had been. He wasn't sure. He was awake eyes open. And yet the dream continued to play before him.
“Madda,” Frank said. “Turn off the monitor.”
“Oh, right. Sorry,” Dave said.
The vid wall before Ryan hazed to black, then reformatted to show his vitals. Across the wall, a green line blipped to the rhythm of his heart. From that, Laing pulled out to see the room. Standard hospital setup. With Dave and Frank standing over him, Laing guessed he was the patient.
“Sorry about that,” Frank said. “Med-techs insisted you wear a neuro-monitor. You had some big spikes they were worried about.”
“Those are some wild dreams you got,” Madda said. As Laing turned on him, he quickly added. “Sorry—we shouldn't have looked.”
“Where...?” Ryan sputtered, his mouth cotton dry.
Frank offered him a glass of water, which he sucked down. “You're on the Mercy. Hospital airship.”
The Mercy was part of a new breed of flying machines, an ungainly cross between a blimp and an airplane. Its massive lozenge-shaped bulk was propelled by a single tail propeller. The ship's semirigid frame allowed it to lift and carry a payload far exceeding any other airborne vehicle. The size of a football field, the Mercy could handle large-scale medical issues while maintaining absolute quarantine.
“Hospital ship?” Ryan stammered.
“You were fucked up, Laing. No better way of getting you off Company grounds. Mercy's been hovering over the CIA since the bioattack. We put you on a medevac. Got you admitted up here to a private, sealed suite. All med data stays in this room.”
“How long?”
“You've been out for an hour,” Madda replied.
“And the disk?”
“It's nothing,” Frank said.
“Ah, fuck,” Ryan said, exhausted desperation flooding him.
“Just an old trinket.”
Madda pulled the disk from his pocket. “It's a cipher disk,” he said. “Two concentric circles, one over the other with an alphabet ringing each. It was one of the first cryptology machines.”
Ryan stared at it. The copper was tarnished and dirty. On the disk, only one letter was embossed, repeating over and over: Ω.
“But all the letters are the same,” Ryan said in confusion.
“Like I said, worthless.” Frank's irritation was obvious.
“No,” Madda said. “It makes sense. It's the perfect finale to the Kryptos enigma. It's a cipher machine with only one letter—omega. In Greek, omega's the end—the last letter. It's everything. So this is the final key—that which deciphers everything.”
“Yeah? Show me,” Frank snapped.
Madda shook his head in frustration. “It doesn't really decipher everything. It's an idea—a concept to take from the sculpture. That the universe itself—just as you see it—is both ciphered and clean. Just depends on your point of view.”
Frank rolled his eyes.
Ryan's frustration rose to match Frank's. Could he have risked so much, wasted so much time, for nothing? He reached out and Madda plunked the disk in his hand.
A drone tingle. Still-frame recollections of his dream flashed through his head and shot over the vid wall.
“What the fuck?” Frank said, catching the images.
“Spikes in brain activity kicked the neuro-monitor back on,” Madda said, also riveted to the picture.
Ryan stared at the vid image of his own thoughts. In his hands, the disk itself was linking to his drone technology.
“It's the disk,” Madda said.
“The dream must have been from Ryan's contact with it in the woods.”
“There's more...” Ryan said. But he couldn't get anything else out before being ripped into virtual.
It held suspended before him, its two concentric disks spinning. Laing floated over it, lost in uncoded space.
Back in hard reality, Laing could just hear Madda speaking. “It's—fuckin' amazing. That code work. Masterful,” Madda said.
A sense of violation whipped over Ryan. He didn't like Frank and Madda staring into his mind—or whatever this was. But before he could process the thought, the disk began to spin faster. Laing watched it, trans-fixed. Finally, he reached for it.
“No!” Ryan heard Madda yell. “That's sticky code. You interface and it will chew right through your system.”
But it was too late. Besides, what other choice did he have?
Code punctured Ryan, burning through the drones' system. He felt them go; black settled heavily. Then, a slow resolve. Darkness morphed through gray to white. The disk was gone. In its place, a man resolved.
A ghost.
“Hello, Ryan.” The voice was so familiar.
Christopher Turing stood before him.
42
Slowly, Ryan grew accustomed to the emptiness. He centered on the man before him, trying to understand what was happening. And not wanting it to end.
“I'm dead,” Laing said, riding the edge of shock.
“No, Ryan. This is digital stasis. I'm a backup. The disk keyed me. Well, your bio signature on the disk keyed me. You're not dead, and I'm not real.”
“Not real,” Ryan said slowly. Despair threatened to overwhelm him. Then, relief. Looking into Turing's eyes, Ryan could almost believe that the last years had been a nightmare from which he was finally waking up. Ryan restrained himself from wrapping his arms around the man. He knew there was nothing to touch.
“I've missed you,” Ryan said, barely able to get the words out.
Turing nodded. “That doesn't bode well for my longevity.”
“You've been dead for five years.”
Turing nodded again.
“I... killed you.”
That got through Turing's smooth veneer. His mouth fell open. “You?”
“I...”
Turing stopped him. “Ryan—it doesn't matter. Whatever happened, I'm not that man. Whatever I did—whatever you did—it's irrelevant. I'm a figment of the past. I'm the man who would never harm you.”
Ryan shook his head. “You're nothing. You're a program. Software.” He needed to believe that to hold himself together.
“Walk with me,” Turing said.
Before them, the no-space cracked and a scene coded into existence. Grapevines sprouted, one by one, filling the space. Laing's feet sank into rich earth. The sky shifted to a soft blue, clouds speckling in. Rolling hills cut into the horizon. Turing walked down the vineyard. Ryan followed.
“I am Christopher Turing. I am his memory. I act as he would act. I satisfy the artificial intelligence test fashioned by my namesake, Alan Turing. You cannot distinguish me from my flesh-and-blood counterpart.
Ryan slowly nodded. Turing smiled and trudged into the vines.
“It's been hard.” Ryan didn't want to say anything, admit anything, but how many times had he longed for this moment? For one more second with this man?
“Coming online, I knew there was a strong probability that my corporeal incarnation would be dead. I am sorry I couldn't be there for you in the years since my . . . death.”
Ryan shook his head, the shell within him beginning to crack. “It's better. I'm not the man you knew. I feel compacted—weighed down by the decisions I've made—the havoc I've caused. And without you, there was no end. No way out.” Ryan didn't want to speak the words, to admit this to anyone, especially himself, but he couldn't stop the rush of emotion.
“You want release? Absolution?”
Ryan laughed, shaking his head. “Just peace.”
“Then we are in agreement. I too want peace. Echelon was built on that desire.”
“Echelon is dead. It died with you.”
“No, Ryan.” Ryan looked up at Turing. The old man continued. “Echelon was an experiment. That you found the disk means it failed. Peace through gentle manipulation didn't work. I always knew that was a possibility. And I made contingency plans.”
“What?”
The shift in Turing's tone, edged down to cold rationality, was startling. “Humanity is a tough nut. We humans are fighters, Ryan. We're programmed to respond to the hunt, the flight, the kill. Echelon tried to deaden those extremes. Obviously, it failed.”
“Turing,” Ryan's relief ebbed under a surge of doubt and fear. “What are you saying?”
“Have you heard of the spadefoot toad?” Turing asked.
The question threw Ryan into confused silence. Christopher smiled. With a wave of his hand, he wiped the sim. The vineyards went to white space. Then color pixelated over the blank, finally settling into an arid desert. The roll of time commenced as Turing spoke.
“They are indigenous to the North American desert. They're very successful. The toads hibernate deep in the earth for most of their lives. Then, the rains come.”
Clouds rolled in and drenched the desert, pocking it with small pools of water.
“The toads lay their eggs in these pools. The tadpoles have only days to go through their cycle and emerge fully formed. If they can't do it in time, the entire population dies.”
In a pool at their feet, Laing saw a mass of tadpoles. In fast time, the land around them began to dry.
Christopher continued. “They have a rare technique to ensure their survival. Among the algae-eating tadpoles, there are a few who morph to carnivore—and more specifically to cannibal. They eat their brothers to ensure the survival of the species.”
Below them, several toads emerged from the pool even as it dried. The carnivorous amphibians buried themselves as the pool's remaining tadpoles baked in the sun.
Ryan watched, confused. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I seeded humanity with a carnivore—in case Echelon's pool ran dry.”
Ryan stared at the man before him. In the face he'd been longing to see for so many years, he now caught something else: something foreign, or maybe a facet he had always refused to acknowledge.
“Krueger?” Ryan cringed at the word, so wanting it not to be true and knowing it was.
“Yes.”
“No.” The word rose dead from Ryan's lips.
“I knew him, before.”
“You what?”
“Before. Before Echelon, before I became Christopher Turing.”
The ghost saw Ryan's expression and laughed. “I know. Hard to accept that I had a life before you came along.”
“You're not Christopher Turing?”
“I am. I was. But I was other things before. Krueger and I weren't close. But our world was small.”
“Your world?”
“Mathematics. I worked on pure math. Krueger worked at the fore-front of computational biology. Sounds boring, I know. But, you see, we were both obsessed with patterns. And we were both good. Very good.”
“What happened?”
Turing laughed again, waving his arm around the white space. “Life. I found Echelon. I dropped the identity I'd grown up with and chose another. I'll admit to some hubris in choosing the name. But Alan Turing was my hero, the father of computer science. My work was a derivative of his inspiration, so I became Christopher Turing.”
“And Krueger?”
“He had a different path to follow.” Turing gazed off into the distance. “I'd never seen a mind like his. His ability to burrow under all the clutter to
find that nugget of truth was astounding. He was a genius. And he was mad.”
Laing looked down at the disk, which had reappeared at their feet.
Turing continued. “We're each a product of his environment. Me. You. Krueger. Generations of death preceded him. He was his father's son.”
“I know all this. The Krueger family. Memphis. That's why we brought him down.”
“It's part of it. But there's more. Krueger saw the pattern underlying the biological flow. And he saw that pattern on a large scale. He saw that the world itself, all life in it, makes up a single entity. And—being his father's son—he found a virus that would corrupt that entity.”
“So you spiked him.”
Turing continued, lost in the recall. “He saw an image that even I couldn't fathom. I envied him for that. And I feared him.”
“But you let him live?”
“I did. And not only that—I honed his cruelty to suit my purpose. I showed him how to shape the world through the terror he was so inclined to wreak.”
“EMPYRE . . .” Ryan muttered the word.
“As Echelon formed you, EMPYRE rebuilt Krueger.”
“But why?”
“Krueger saw the earth as a single entity. Good or bad, we humans are the driving force on this planet—the entity's brain, you could say. Just as Krueger created biological viruses to disrupt neurotransmission, so he created a new virus—this one capable of cutting the connections in that larger brain.”
Ryan looked at Turing in confusion. Then horrible understanding filtered in. “The flow. Krueger created a virus to kill the flow.”
Turing nodded like a proud father. “We once used computers to model organic life. Ironic that our technology has grown so complicated that it is now through biology that we understand computer systems.”
“Jesus,” Ryan gasped. “Cutting the flow would change everything. It would destroy the connections binding us.”
“A neurotoxin to the global organism.”
“But why would you want to keep that kind of doomsday device? And why keep the man who built it?”
Empyre Page 29