by Ted Bell
“I had a lot of help, believe me. At any rate, when Her Majesty learned of my situation, she summoned me to Buckingham Palace. And very generously offered Alexei the protection services of Special Branch in the event of my—my passing. He will enjoy the same level of protection as the Royals for as long as he needs it. She even said she would be happy to have Alexei stay with her at Buckingham Palace if I was to be away on ‘business’ for any considerable length of time. He’d be safe enough there, I’d imagine.”
“Safe as houses, not to put too fine a point on it.”
“Yes.”
“Her Royal Majesty is a wonder, isn’t she? A truly great and noble woman.”
“She is. There’ll never be another like her, unfortunately for England. She had a surprise for me while I was at Buck House. She intends to enlarge my tawdry wardrobe.”
“What do you mean?”
“She intends to add a few rather spiffy items. A dark blue velvet mantle, a black velvet bonnet with a plume of white ostrich and black heron feathers, a collar of gold, and a garter.”
“The Order of the Garter? Alex, how wonderful! The highest order of chivalry or knighthood in England, my God! I mean, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so, yes. I was deeply moved by her generosity and kindness in thinking me worthy.”
They both sat in silence for a few moments, lost in their own thoughts. Nell finally spoke.
“Alex, forgive me. But is all this discussion about Alexei’s future your extraordinarily gentle and kind way of firing me on the spot?”
Hawke laughed.
“Good God, no. Nell, listen. It’s only my very roundabout way of asking you to be my son’s godmother.”
“Oh! Alex, how very dear. Godmother, me? So unexpected, I don’t—don’t know what to say . . .”
“A simple yes would be the preferred response.”
“Of course, yes! Yes, of course! I would be honored beyond words to be your son’s godmother. Thank you for even considering me.”
“After all you’ve done for us, Nell, I would never consider anyone else.”
Standing outside his bedroom door, she gave him a hug and then pulled away. It was late. Her room was one flight up.
“Good night, Alex. I thank you for the most wonderful night of my entire life. And I mean that with all my heart.”
“You actually enjoyed it?”
“I did.”
Hawke’s eyes were moist and full of questions.
“You might be the best girl there is, you know.”
“I wouldn’t mind being your best girl.”
“Then would you mind too terribly much if I gave you a good-night kiss?”
“Only if you swear not to frighten the servants.”
Hawke laughed and pulled her into his arms. The kiss, when it came, was full of real emotion and mutual animalistic need. When it was over, he took her by the hand and led her into his bedroom. Pelham had laid a fire against the chill rain outside and it was the only light.
“Can we sit by the fire?” she said, glancing nervously at the huge canopied bed lurking in the shadows.
“Of course,” Hawke said, pulling the feathery down quilt from his big four-poster. “We’ll sit by the fire and tell ghost stories.”
Hawke sat down first, looking up at her, finding her eyes in the flickering firelight.
“I want you so,” she said.
“And I you.”
She began to undress and he watched, taking in her beauty like a starving man, a man whose eyes were dying of hunger.
“Now you,” she said, dropping to her knees beside him. “I’ll help.”
When she was done, they lay down beside each other on the soft quilt and made love, their bodies coming together naturally and easily, no clumsy missteps, just wordlessly becoming each other’s favorite animal.
When Hawke awoke at dawn the next morning, she was gone.
He sat there before the hearth for a while, the quilt wrapped round him, thinking, staring into the dying embers.
One fire going out, one fire just starting, he thought, and the thought brought a warm light of happiness into his normally cold blue eyes that had been missing for a very long time.
Forty-three
Iran
Darius couldn’t sleep.
He was afraid of what he might find when he slept: more heinous visions of doom. The failure to achieve his vision, bearing witness to his own death, slipping beneath the waves of history without a trace. All of it worse than the worst nightmare. At night, his once-real dreams seemed to have fled. His lifelong goal of using the power of his own unique brain to change the world. To be a powerful force with dominion over all mankind. To be a brutish civilization’s salvation and ruler.
To clean up once and for all the fucking mess human beings had made of the planet. And the mess they made of the human species. Or, as Perseus called it, “global cleansing.” And, until now, working in secret with his most astounding creation, a quantum machine capable of superhuman intelligence he’d named Perseus, he had believed he was edging ever closer to realizing those dreams.
But, lately, he wondered.
Lately, he was afraid.
Perseus’s staggering intellectual powers were doubling every day, growing exponentially. Precisely as he and Dr. Cohen had calculated in the early days at the Stanford AI Research Institute. Soon, far sooner than his mother country’s loathsome president and the posturing mullahs in Tehran imagined, his machine would achieve the Singularity. One split second after that epic moment, there would be no more powerful “being” on the planet than Perseus.
Together, creator and creation, they would rule.
But in his dreams, unlike Perseus, he was not all-powerful, too. He was weak and alone. In these dreams he was frail, once more that frightened little cripple, about to be thrown out of his mother’s splendid palace, thrown to the wolves, left to fend for himself in a frightening world he had no knowledge of. Where people were dragged screaming from their houses in the middle of the night because they worshipped at the wrong altar. And then disappeared into prisons, into the ground.
In his night visions, he was not the boy wizard who had built his first computer when he was eight years old. And taught it to write poetry and symphonies to rival Mozart or Bach. Who made his childhood toys walk and talk, animated, as natural as any real boy. But he was not himself anymore. Not even a pale shadow. In his dreams he was negative space.
And these nightly visions and frightful apparitions had planted a seed; a dark, metastatic cancer was growing in his mind that could not be denied.
He fought the notion, his nagging doubts and suspicions, with all the considerable intellectual power at his command. He told himself it could not be possible that Perseus was insinuating these dreams into his mind. Planting these paralyzing thoughts. It just couldn’t be. Integral to the psyche he had built into the neural pathways of the machine was a love of its creator. Reverence. This was a machine that had, after all, always called him “Father.”
But then something had happened that made him wonder.
A few nights ago, having taken some powerful sleeping drug that his personal goddess Aphrodite had created for him, he awoke to find himself gone from his bed. He was outside in the cold night air. He was high atop the seaside cliff where the observatory stood, just above the brilliantly lit power plant. His chair, resting on the most precipitous outcropping of rock, was empty. He himself was seated out at the very edge of the cliff, looking down between his foreshortened limbs into an angry sea crashing against the rocks hundreds of feet below.
He suddenly had a very powerful urge to use his strong arms to propel himself into space. Such an appealing idea! To be free of the ridiculous chair caused by his cursed lifelong infirmity. It was all he could do to remain there on the rock until the desire passed
. He did it by reminding himself that Perseus had long promised him legs. Real legs, genome-replicant legs like the ones he should have been born with instead of these hideously withered stumps.
He had struggled back into the chair and returned to his chambers. Aphrodite was sleeping soundly in his bed, seemingly unaware that he’d even been gone. He lay awake for the rest of the night, wondering why a human being standing on the verge of becoming the most powerful man on earth would suddenly have a near uncontrollable urge to commit suicide.
It was what had prevented him from sleeping again tonight. Why he was out on the seaward terrace in the small hours of the morning, feeling sorry for himself.
“Master?”
He heard Aphrodite’s whispery voice behind him. He turned and saw her approaching him across the polished white marble terrace, now a hazy blue beneath the moon and starlight. She was wearing a thin, diaphanous gown that revealed a lush body that never failed to arouse him. She was a gift, visible proof that Perseus loved him still. Was she not? In addition to offering her body, she opened her mind to him. He felt he could tell her anything. He’d never had a real friend, much less a confidant, in his entire life. But now he did, and she was a great aid and comfort to him.
She padded silently through the drifting sea mist, across the stone, kissed the top of his head, and then composed herself at his feet, looking up at him with adoring eyes.
“Another sleepless night?” she said, in her soothing tone. Her long slender fingers stroked the nub where his right leg should have been, and still the phantom leg could feel it.
“Yes. Even your magic potions no longer help. So I sit here and gaze at the troubled sea until the sun returns. All these water molecules interacting with each other. Chaos, but beautiful.”
“Your mind is troubled, not the sea. It cares not for this world. Unburden yourself, Darius. Give your fears to me so that I may dispose of them.”
“Oh, my dear girl, I’ve no idea where to begin. I have dreamed of glory for so long and now—now I fear I shall never see that day.”
“Why? You have created a miracle in Perseus. Together you will write your names across the stars. The time of the Singularity draws near.”
“Yes. It does. And the closer it comes, the further removed I feel.”
“Tell me why.”
“I am not a strong man. I have always been physically weak, and now I grow but weaker. My remaining life span is limited. I may not live to see the coming of glory.”
“But Perseus will soon have the power to change all that. To heal you. To make you smarter and stronger, more—virile. To stop you from growing older. Hasn’t he already promised you strong legs to walk on?”
“He has promised me a lower body exoskeleton. I’ve asked about it many times and he always dissembles. Says he’s fine-tuning it, or something. I think he has the power to produce the prosthetic now, even without the Singularity. But he chooses not to use it. I’m left with my two stumps.”
“Why would he care so little?”
“Because I’m useless to him now. He no longer needs me. And the stronger his powers grow, the further we two grow apart. And when he does achieve the Singularity . . . well, who knows? It’s out of my control.”
“You are his creator, Darius. He has evolved directly from your biological humanity. You are an integral part of Perseus, in his electric DNA. It’s indisputable.”
“Yes, dear girl. But Perseus is not an integral part of me. There is a gulf between us now that perhaps may not be bridged. It may already be too late.”
“I don’t understand. Can you be patient and explain?”
He looked up at the sky, dizzy with stars, for a long time before he spoke.
“I am a humanist. Perseus is not. I am of the earth. Perseus is of the universe—and beyond.”
“What is a humanist? I have searched my database. I don’t know this word.”
“Humanism is a system of thought, originating in the Renaissance, derived from the Greeks. One attaches prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters. A humanist’s beliefs stress the potential value and goodness of human beings. They emphasize common human needs. They seek solely rational ways of solving human problems. It is a secular ideology, one that espouses reason, ethics, and justice while rejecting religious dogma as a basis of morality. And, most important in my case, decision making.”
“And this humanism, it is good?”
“I believe so. It has always been my deep conviction that pure humanism will become the religion of the future, that is, the cult of all that pertains to man—no, all of life itself—sanctified at last and raised to the level of moral value. My life’s work has been to create a supremely rational force, god, whatever you want to call it, that will ultimately govern mankind, the planet, and, potentially, the universe itself.”
“Yet you kill humans. Countless numbers of innocents. You and Perseus.”
“Yes. It is called pragmatism. Lives are often sacrificed for the greater good. A rational being is capable of allowing something like what happened in Israel. Or London.”
“Were these beliefs not at the root of Perseus’s creation?”
“I thought so. It was certainly my intent when designing the machine. Now, I’m not so sure.”
“Perseus is not a humanist?”
“No. Definitely not. Not what I had in mind at all.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“A merging of human intelligence and machine intelligence to create a new being. Vastly more intelligent, a billion, billon times more intelligent, but one that would also possess human qualities. This is where I believe I’ve failed. It was far more complicated and difficult than I anticipated.”
“What was more difficult?”
“Giving Perseus the essential yet subtle human qualities. Attributes like the ability to be funny. To be sad or jealous, or loving, or even to understand forgiveness and hatred. What he has is logic.”
“He lacks your altruism, master.”
“Good choice of words. Yes.”
“But. Is logic bad?”
“Without those other qualities, humanistic qualities, yes. Look at the world from his point of view. Perseus looks at mankind and sees us as incapable of existing without eradicating species after species. As corrupting and defiling the delicate resources of the earth, as murdering countless billions of our fellow men. And of overpopulating our celestial home with scarcely a thought. We’ve had many conversations about this. Perseus believes we—humanity, that is—would be extremely likely to continue this behavior should we ever become smart enough to escape the earth and spread our kind throughout the universe.”
“And what would he do about it? Once he achieves the Singularity?”
“We become ants. When you are a trillion times more powerful than say, a mosquito, do you think twice about swatting it? Seeing that smear of blood? No. A mosquito is of no consequence. Worse, a mere annoyance. Dealt with, you see?”
“Removed.”
“What do you think? We will have outlived our usefulness. We are no longer part of evolution. We are, and Perseus has already said this to me, ‘a waste of atoms.’ We have forfeited our right to exist. Without us, he and new, ever more powerful generations of his kind could create a new Eden on earth. A beautiful blue-and-green garden uncontaminated by the poison, not of the biblical snake, but of the man. And then the evolution could begin again, but governed by a supremely rational, logical, force.”
“So God failed?”
“Good question. Obviously, God allows bad things to happen. Does that make him a failure? Or is Perseus simply part of God’s plan? Is he, in fact, God himself? Or, at least, leading us toward God? Who knows?”
“Perseus?”
“Perhaps he knows, yes. He’s not seen fit to take me into his confidence.”
/> “Is this good, Darius? Or bad?”
“It’s not whether it’s good or bad. It’s simply going to happen. You cannot stop evolution. But, if you’re a humanist, it’s obviously bad. If you’re not, you could argue that perhaps the universe, and certainly the earth, would be better for our extinction.”
“So what happens next?”
“The end of the world as we know it, I suppose.”
“You will die?”
“Everyone will.”
“Can he be stopped?”
“I don’t think so. I went up to the observatory yesterday to view a newly discovered supernova they wanted me to see. The power plant is visible from the entrance, just down the mountainside. It provides for the enormous energy needs of Perseus. There are now armed guards posted all around it. I didn’t put them there. So who do you imagine did it?”
“Perseus?”
“Yes. I must speak to the captain of the Guards. I think Yusef Tatoosh is still my oldest ally, my defender. Him, at least, I still trust. I doubt he ordered the power plant guarded. Those under his command look to me for leadership since they know not of Perseus’s existence. They would side with me in a fight, that I do know. The loyalty of the Guards is beyond question. It’s small comfort, but it’s something.”
“Perseus sees you as a threat to his existence?”
“I’m beginning to think so. But, deep inside, he has powerful feelings for me. Because he can feel my hand at work in the fire of every neural or qubit synapse of his being. In some ways, killing me would be tantamount to killing himself. I think that’s the only reason I’m still alive. My death is his own.”
“What will you do?”
“Try to reason with him before it’s too late. Convince him to upgrade my intelligence with nanotransmitters until I am on a par with him. Extend my life span indefinitely. In other words, become one with him. So that, together, the merged entity possesses all those qualities of goodness and morality I told you about.”
“That was your original intent.”
“Yes. But, being merely human, I forgot the most important law of all.”