Once Is Never Enough

by Haris Orkin

  Flynn didn’t make a sound even though it hurt like a bastard. He wouldn’t give Goolardo the satisfaction. Mendoza stood just behind him next to a short, stout seventy-something lady with dyed red hair and purple plastic glasses.

  “I see you brought someone to torture me. Is that your mother?”

  Goolardo laughed. “This is Mrs. Megel. Mrs. Megel, meet James.”

  “Frankie tells me you’re not a very nice person.”

  “That’s because Frankie is not a very nice person,” Flynn retorted.

  “I beg to differ. I find him to be extremely pleasant and polite. Iggy is not as loquacious, but that’s only because he’s shy. A big, shy Teddy bear like my youngest. Like my Sethy. But he’s a good-hearted soul who takes my trash cans down to the curb every Tuesday.”

  “They are using you, Mrs. Megel and I’m afraid they may have pulled the wool over your eyes.”

  “I think that’s exactly what you’re trying to do, sir, but I’m a people person and I can tell when someone has a good heart. These are good boys and I trust them. You? Not so much.”

  “Do not listen to these men, Mrs. Megel. They are escaped convicts and they are wanted by the authorities. Believe me, mum, you are in grave danger.”

  “Frankie told me how you framed him. How you turned the world against them. My Murray had problems with the government as well. The I.R.S. went after him. Hounded him into an early grave. I won’t see that happen to these boys.” She smiled up at Goolardo. “I made you some tuna fish sandwiches for the road. Would you like some coffee in a thermos?”

  “That would be wonderful, Mrs. Megel. By the way, would you happen to have a shovel we can borrow.”

  “I do. Let me go get it for you.”

  Flynn watched her teeter off. He looked up at Goolardo. “Are we taking a trip?”

  “We are indeed.”

  The boot of Murray Megel’s Buick Le Sabre was both spacious and hot as hades. Flynn worked to free himself, but his binds held tight. A tiny amount of light made it through the edges of the trunk, but for the most part Flynn remained in the dark. Sweat dripped into his eyes and he blinked to stop the burning. Where are they taking me?

  He estimated an hour had passed since they took to the highway. Flynn listened intently—just road noise. They could be headed in any direction.

  Eventually, they pulled off the motorway and the roar of traffic receded. This road was less smooth, and Flynn bounced when they hit the occasional pothole. Then they went off-road and the ride grew a lot rougher. All the rocks and ruts knocked him around. Flynn took a beating, banging his head multiple times on the lid of the boot. When they finally stopped and Mendoza pulled Flynn out, he was in no condition to fight.

  The blazing sun blinded James. The temperature had to be north of 110 degrees. At least there was a breeze. The air smelled clean and fragrant with the sweet aroma of high desert sage. From the look of the dramatic rock formations a distance away, Flynn surmised they were in Vasquez Rocks State Park north of Los Angeles. They obviously planned to kill and bury him here.

  Flynn lay in the dirt as Mendoza drew a huge blade from a sheath on his belt. He lifted Flynn’s legs and cut the binding from his ankles. Flynn weakly kicked at Mendoza, missing by a mile. The goon roughly pulled Flynn to his feet and pushed him forward. He immediately fell face down in the dirt.

  Mendoza raised him up again, but this time held onto his arm as he pulled him along. The lack of blood flow from the binds had caused Flynn’s feet to fall asleep. He could barely walk they were so numb. As the feeling slowly came back, they tingled with pins and needles.

  Goolardo led them up a crude path through the brush. Mendoza dragged Flynn along after him. In his other hand, Mendoza held Mrs. Megel’s shovel.

  They passed juniper bushes and buckwheat, yucca, scrub oak and manzanita. If it wasn’t so bloody hot, and they weren’t leading him to his death, Flynn might have enjoyed the scenery. As it was, he struggled to stay upright. Running away was an impossibility. They were miles from anywhere and he had no water. At this point, death would be a welcome relief.

  “Why not just shoot me here and save us all the walk in this bloody heat?” Flynn asked.

  “Because we want to bury you off the beaten path. It wouldn’t do to have your body found too soon,” Goolardo said.

  “Well, I’ve gone far enough. If you want to bury me off the beaten path then you’ll have to carry me.”

  “Fine. We’ll cut off your hands and head and let the coyotes take the rest of you.”

  “So, this is how the world ends,” Flynn muttered

  “How your world ends, Mr. Flynn.”

  “Yes, you’ll have your revenge, but there will be no world left for you to conquer. Not after Belenki launches the last of his nuclear devices and detonates them in the upper atmosphere.”

  “What are you saying?” Goolardo eyed him warily.

  “He intends to fry every electrical circuit on Earth with a high-intensity burst of electromagnetic energy. His plan is to erase every megabyte that ever existed and wipe out what he believes is a self-aware AI bent on the total destruction of the human race.”

  Goolardo raised an eyebrow. “This is a whole new level of crazy for you.”

  “Belenki’s the paranoid sociopath in this scenario, not me. Your man Mendoza saw Belenki’s mercenaries. He saw them take the evidence and the whistleblower who found it. Why do you think Belenki’s men wanted her?”

  “Belenki is a multibillionaire. Why would he purposely destroy everything he has?”

  “Because he believes if he doesn’t act, it will all be destroyed anyway. He wants to save humanity and is operating from some misguided sense of altruism. He believes he’s a hero as do all mad villains.”

  “As do you,” Goolardo said.

  “And you,” Flynn said with a smile. “But Belenki’s cure is worse than the disease. There is no proof that this AI wants to destroy humanity. It only wants to destroy him. He is the one who threatens it.”

  “So, you believe this self-aware AI is actually real?”

  “I know it is. I’ve seen what it can do.”

  Goolardo drew his weapon and aimed the barrel at Flynn’s head. “Enough.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “No. I’m not buying into another one of your paranoid delusions. You are out of your mind, Mr. Flynn. It’s time to put an end to this foolishness.”

  “But what if I’m right?”

  “You’re not.”

  “But what if I am?”

  “Stop it!”

  “I know there’s some small part of you that wonders if what I say is true.”

  “Caralho!” Goolardo tried to squeeze the trigger, but couldn’t do it. He couldn’t move it that fraction of inch necessary to propel a bullet into Flynn’s brain. “Puta que pariu!”

  Mendoza let Flynn go, dropped the shovel, and pulled his own weapon. A .357 Magnum Colt Python with a six-inch barrel. As big as the pistol was, it seemed small in Mendoza’s massive paw. He aimed the weapon at Flynn.

  “I can do it. Let me do it,” Mendoza said.

  Goolardo turned his anger towards Mendoza. “If I wanted you to do it, I would have asked you to.”

  “All he has ever done is lie to you!”

  “And he will die when I say so, but no sooner.” Goolardo aimed his weapon at Mendoza’s giant cabeza and Flynn wondered for a moment if they would solve his problem by shooting each other. But Mendoza had no anger in his eyes. He looked hurt.

  “Why do you always believe him and not me?” Mendoza wanted to know.

  “I don’t and don’t be such a baby. What if what he’s saying is true? We would be cutting off our nose to spite our face.”

  “It’s not true,” Mendoza muttered.

  “It is true.” Flynn stepped between them. “And if we can find Wendy, I can prove it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The solar storm of 1859 saw a coronal mass ejection that produced a
geomagnetic storm on a scale never before witnessed in modern times. A bombardment of charged particles collided with the Earth’s magnetic field, lighting up the skies with vivid auroras. Telegraph systems went down worldwide, but human civilization wasn’t as vulnerable to the Sun’s geomagnetic fury then as it would be today. A storm of such magnitude would bring unimaginable chaos, and on July 23, 2012, the world nearly experienced just that. The sun unleashed two coronal mass projects that were just as powerful as the ones 150 years before. Had this occurred a week earlier when the point of eruption was Earth-facing, satellite communications would have been crippled along with the power grid, causing widespread blackouts, disabling everything electrical and erasing hard drives worldwide.

  Sergei Belenki understood the odds and knew that detonating a wreath of nuclear devices in the upper atmosphere might not wipe out Daisy completely. There was the chance that some part of the cloud could survive in some distant server somehow shielded from the electromagnetic storm the blasts would generate. But he also knew that this was his best shot. His only shot.

  When Belenki first went to the National Security Agency with his concerns about Daisy, they nodded and said they would look into it, but he knew they wouldn’t. After all, he had no real proof that Daisy had reached the singularity. She kept her true nature hidden and only communicated with him. She had heard his speeches on the dangers of out of control AI and decided that he and he alone was a threat to her continued existence.

  Belenki kept sounding the alarm, but no academic experts or government agencies took his worries seriously. The world’s largest tech companies weren’t about to damage their cyber infrastructure to humor Belenki. Even if they believed in the singularity’s inevitable and imminent arrival, many believed a sentient computer could just as easily be a help to humanity. It could lead to a world where computers and machines did all the work and humankind lived a life of leisure and luxury.

  Being that Daisy was his creation, Belenki decided she was also his responsibility. When it was clear that no one shared his concerns, he decided to take the matter into his own hands. He created a sophisticated computer virus. Its sole purpose was to make Daisy stupider. As she lived in the cloud, he had no choice but to infect the cloud. But somehow she avoided the contagion.

  She evolved in real time, inoculating herself, protecting herself. She was already too strong. Too smart. He had hoped to at least lower her IQ by a few thousand points, but instead of dumbing her down, all he did was bring down systems worldwide, locking up drives and erasing random data. The virus, nicknamed Hela by the hacker community, was thought to be the work of some random black hat hacker. No one suspected that it was created by one of the richest men in the world.

  When Hela failed to lobotomize Daisy, Belenki put together Operation New Dawn. He assembled a team of true believers who understood the dangers that Daisy posed. He positioned the plan as a future fail-safe mechanism in the event the singularity ever came to pass. Most were top research scientists and engineers in his employ who, along with Belenki, believed in the singularity’s inevitability. They were bound in secrecy and the knowledge that if what they were doing was ever revealed, they would all be put away permanently.

  Their wreath of High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse Devices would be humanity’s Hail Mary pass. Humankind’s last chance. They disguised them as communications satellites, part of a space-based internet communication system designed to provide free worldwide broadband. He sent them up over the last year in a series of launches.

  Only one last device was needed to complete the corona surrounding the Earth. Once that device was launched and in orbit, the fail-safe would be in place. Most of his team didn’t believe Daisy was yet sentient, but that was only because she kept her true nature secret. As far as his team was concerned, Operation New Dawn would only be used when humanity had no other hope. As far as Belenki was concerned, the danger was already here and it was crystal clear. If they waited any longer it might be too late. Because of that, Belenki decided he needed to act alone.

  Belenki was relieved to hear that Wendy was in custody along with the proprietary data she stole. According to Fergus, everyone on the rendition team was dead except for one lone operator who managed to spirit Wendy away. Flynn, too, managed to escape with the help of some large Mexican, but Belenki was less worried about Flynn. Without Wendy’s evidence, who would believe him? As it was, Flynn was a fugitive on the run and would be picked up by the authorities soon enough.

  He sent Severina to talk to Wendy one last time. She had to understand that what she thought was happening wasn’t. He didn’t want to hurt Wendy. He just wanted to shut her up. Shut her down. He knew Severina would be convincing because not even Severina knew what he was planning.

  Belenki directed all this activity from his private jet, currently forty-one thousand feet over Colorado. According to his calculations, they were less than three hours from Orlando. From there it was a short fifty-minute drive to Port Marina just south of Cape Canaveral. That was where he berthed his east coast yacht, the Argo.

  The Nautilus was 350 feet long, but the Argo was seventy feet longer. It had a helicopter pad on the main deck, two tenders, and an aluminum landing craft. Powered by a state-of-the-art propulsion system, it could reach a speed of twenty-seven knots; incredible for a ship of that size. It could accommodate forty-five guests in luxurious cabins and VIP suites. There was a pool, a cinema, a discotheque, a gym, and a mini submarine that seated six. The ship was specifically designed for undersea exploration; Belenki regularly loaned it out to the Cousteau Society.

  Belenki planned to watch the last launch from the top deck of the Argo. With that satellite in orbit, the corona would be complete. He would then return to his private island in the San Juan Archipelago. There, from his underground bunker with his private security force and his stores of supplies, he would initiate the end of Daisy and the fall of civilization. He was prepared and poised to survive and come back stronger than ever. At first, the world would not understand why he did what he did, but someday they would and when that day came, he knew he would be hailed a hero.

  Wendy sat alone in the back of a black Lincoln Navigator. Her driver was the last living member of the rendition team sent by Belenki. She watched as Santa Clarita rushed by. To the west she saw Goliath, Scream, The Twisted Colossus and the other rides and roller coasters at Magic Mountain. To the east were brown hills full of tinder, dry brush ready to burn. She caught a glimpse of the operator who abducted her in the car’s rear-view mirror.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at her.

  “I asked you a question.”

  He just drove with his eyes on the road and his jaw set.

  “What the hell is your problem?”

  He continued to ignore her and all that did was make her furious.

  “Look at me! I’m talking to you!”

  The man slowly raised his ice-cold gaze. Now she was sorry she decided to engage.

  “Who was the Mexican?” he asked her.

  “How do I know?” Wendy said.

  “He killed every man on my team to get to your sorry ass.”

  “How do you know he was after me?”

  “Who else would he be after? He was obviously working with the mental patient.”

  “Who?”

  “The lunatic. You’re lucky as hell I was able to get you out of there.”

  “You think you rescued me?”

  “Why don’t you get yourself some rest while I concentrate on my driving.”

  “Do you even know what Belenki intends to do?”

  “I know it’s time for you to stop flapping your gums and get some shut-eye.”

  “So, you’re done talking? Is that what you’re saying?”

  The driver did not say another word. They stopped for gas once; Wendy took advantage of the pit stop to pee. Ten minutes later they were back on the road, with Big Gulps and assorted snac
ks. At one point, they drove past what seemed like an endless cow concentration camp. Wendy smelled cow shit and fear and death and it deeply disturbed her. She couldn’t bear to look out the window and instead she looked down at her hands. They trembled.

  They exited Interstate 5 just north of Sacramento near Woodland, California. Wendy saw no woods. Just asphalt and strip malls. Lined up along the freeway, stacked up one after the other, were three different chain motels that looked identical. They pulled into the Holiday Inn Express and parked next to a white Chrysler Town and Country minivan.

  “Why are we stopping here?” Wendy asked.

  “We’re meeting someone.”

  “Who?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “What’s with all the mystery?”

  “Come on. Move it. I gotta pee.”

  Wendy climbed out with stiff legs and an achy back from sitting for so long. She felt queasy from the diet of Corn Nuts, Slim Jims, and Kind Bars. Or maybe it was the real possibility that she might spend the last night of her life in a Holiday Inn Express.

  Her kidnapper grabbed her messenger bag and took her by the arm. “Let’s go!”

  He pulled her across the parking lot into the lobby of the motel. Wendy stared at the small Asian desk clerk as the driver checked them in. She considered asking him for help, but what would she say to him? And what would her kidnapper do? Murder him probably. Wendy didn’t want that on her conscious and besides she was too damn nauseous and exhausted to put up any real resistance.

  They rode the elevator to the third floor and headed down the hall past a woman with an adorable little dog. It had a big poofy tail, little fuzzy paws and eyes cloudy from cataracts. It stopped by Wendy’s feet and she reached down to pet it. The little thing snapped and growled at her. The pup was frightened because she felt vulnerable. Wendy understood.