“No,” I said, “you’re not.”
We walked back to his rental and drove off. Except for me telling him where to turn, we didn’t say a word the whole way to the Warehouse.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CAL RIPKEN WAY
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 11:19 AM
We were still five blocks from my old shop when I got another text:
You made her mad.
I tried once more to text her back:
Who are you? Please tell me.
The reply was:
My sister is crazy. Be careful.
And nothing after that.
The MindReader uplink was still plugged in, so I tapped my earbud for Yoda. “Got another text. Tell me it came up on your feed.”
“Mmmm, yes,” he said, humming, as he always did. Yoda sounds like some kind of human-honeybee hybrid from a bad fifties sci-fi flick. “The, mmmm, uplink takes screen captures. We have that, but the, mmmm, call log itself is clear.”
“How does that make sense?”
“It, mmmm, doesn’t,” said Yoda.
“Well, damn it, make it make sense.”
“Mmmm-kay.”
I tapped out of the call.
“Now what’s wrong?” asked Sean.
“I was born,” I said.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CASTLE OF LA CROIX DES GARDES
FRENCH RIVIERA
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 8:19 PM LOCAL TIME
The Concierge was in his situation room. Robotic arms with padded hands had lifted him from his wheelchair and settled him with great care and comfort in the command chair. The chair was a gift from Zephyr Bain and was an exact replica of the one used by Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Exact in appearance, not in function. The buttons on the armrests of this chair actually worked, though he used voice command most of the time. The chair had a 360-degree spin and there were dozens of computer monitors positioned at the right ergonomic angle to reduce neck strain. The room lights were low, the temperature a satisfying seventy, with low humidity. Everything was monitored by Calpurnia, the system upon which Zephyr Bain had made her mark on the world of artificial-intelligence computers.
The Concierge turned very slowly to watch the dramas unfolding on the screens. There was so much going on today. Even though he had spent years helping to plan all of it, the total effect was a little overwhelming.
“Your pulse is up,” said the gentle voice of Calpurnia. The intuitive-learning software made her appear to have actual concern for him. It felt nice. The Concierge had no real friends. His lover had died when the bombs went off in Paris. So had two close friends; a third had suffered so much cranial trauma that she was as good as dead. And he could hardly regard either John the Revelator or Zephyr Bain as friends. They were employers, enablers, patrons, and co-conspirators. Besides, they frightened him. Zephyr was a corpse who hadn’t yet bothered to lie down and rest. John was … well, he was what he was. The Concierge had theories, but he didn’t even dare talk about them with Calpurnia. Once, years ago, the Concierge had done a pattern search using voice and facial recognition to try to determine exactly who John was. The information had been confusing, contradictory, and alarming. Men with his face—down to the smallest mole—appeared in paintings of great antiquity and photographs dating back as far as the Civil War. These faces, these ancestors or aspects or whatever they were, had dozens of names. The Concierge was pretty sure he knew the man’s real name, but he had erased all details of that search from his computer. The world was large and strange and old and ugly, and the Concierge didn’t want to turn an ally into an enemy. Even though the Concierge had glimpsed hell on that terrible day in Paris, he had no intention of taking a closer or a more personal look.
“Did you hear me?” asked the computer.
“I heard you, mon ange,” he replied. “It is excitement. Nothing to worry about.”
“Are you sure? I can prescribe a mild tranquilizer.”
“Thank you, but no. There is much to do today and I need to be at my best, non?”
“Very well, if that’s wise,” said Calpurnia, and he could hear just the faintest trace of disapproval there. She was becoming mildly passive-aggressive. It amused him.
“I want a status report on Havoc,” he said.
“All preliminary programs are running with a plus- or minus-five-percent error,” said the computer.
“Show me,” said the Concierge.
The screens went dark, and then one by one they filled as Calpurnia named them. “Mexico City and extended regions,” she said, and the central screen showed a series of smaller windows on which smoke still curled upward from blast zones. Bodies lay everywhere, many under blankets. People carried the injured away on stretchers, but there were very few ambulances or firefighting equipment. “The seven WarDogs have been successfully detonated. A hundred and seventy-one confirmed dead, seventeen hundred and sixty-six wounded.” And the materials used in constructing this subset of WarDogs had been laced with highly concentrated thermite. When their explosive payloads detonated, the heat triggered the thermite, which in turn melted them so thoroughly that nothing useful could be recovered from the wreckage. No one could possibly trace them back to Major Schellinger or Zephyr Bain. Only three fragments were deliberately exempt from the meltdown, and these bore serial numbers that would induce the Mexican authorities to focus their investigation on the Melendez Cartel. Military units were en route to the Melendez compound, assisted by special teams from the United States.
The WarDog models planned for later stages didn’t have this feature because by then it wouldn’t matter who knew what.
Calpurnia went over all the details of the blasts, including response time from emergency services. That data was critical, and was part of a much larger global first-responder database that was constantly being updated.
“Good. Make sure the cartel’s Wi-Fi and landlines remain down until the first shots are fired.”
“Of course.”
“Next?”
The screen now showed a live feed of a high-school football field in Indiana. Ten helicopters sat in two rows of five, each of them connected to big tanker trucks. Figures milled around, checking the flow of chemicals from the trucks to the sprayer tanks affixed to each helicopter. In the air behind the field were six fully loaded choppers, flying in loose formation, heading toward the ghettos of Gary. Another six were approaching for refueling and reloading. The image switched to similar operations near North Philadelphia, South Central Los Angeles, Brownsville-Harlingen, and hundreds of other American cities or neighborhoods. Then the images changed to show the world’s poorest cities in São Tomé and Principe, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Madagascar, Egypt, Somalia, Malawi, Eritrea, Swaziland, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Jamaica, and on and on. So much poverty, even in First World countries like England, Canada, France, Italy, and others. Forty-five million Americans lived below the poverty line. Twelve point seven percent of the global population were scrabbling to live on $1.90 per day. That was a billion people. Calpurnia knew where they all lived. Calpurnia made sure that the sprays, the special food supplements, the water treatments, and all the other elements of Havoc had prepared them for the evolution. Them and two billion more. The ones at the poverty line, the ones just above it. Anyone on welfare, Social Security, public assistance. Anyone who, in the wonderful worldview of Zephyr Bain and John the Revelator, were drains on a damaged system.
And then there were the top two percent. The rich ones who were not part of the necessary technocracy. Calpurnia showed them, too. Zephyr owned points in every bottled water company that mattered. When she couldn’t buy the companies, she bought key employees. The effect was the same. The preparations for Havoc had been running quietly, discreetly, and efficiently for almost five years now.
“Next,” said the Concierge, and the screen showed him the factories that made drones for the military of seventeen cou
ntries. From the smallest hummingbird surveillance robot to the new British Growler automated battle tanks.
“Next.”
A slide show of images of small robot drones being released all over the globe. Production on them had been a major component of Havoc. It had cost a lot to make sure that the drones were indistinguishable from ordinary birds, and to guarantee that the pigeon drones in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington looked like textbook Columba livia domestica and that it was the rose-ringed parakeet in Islamabad, the black-tailed gull in Pohang, the little egret in Taichung, the wood thrush in Washington, D.C. And so on. Birds that were supposed to be there; birds that wouldn’t raise eyebrows. Not until Calpurnia detonated the explosives hidden inside them, shutting down police and fire stations, destroying ambulance and EMT services, destroying cellular towers, and blowing apart power-company substations. Larger drones would be used for national and local offices of FEMA, the National Institutes of Health, the American Red Cross, All Hands Volunteers, the Centers for Disease Control, the International Medical Corps, the National Emergency Response Team, the Urban Search and Rescue Task Force, Mobile Emergency Response Support, the Civil Air Patrol, the National Emergency Technology Guard, and the National Guard. In some cases the offices would be targeted by WarDogs, and when a bigger punch was needed there were always car and truck bombs. The latter weren’t sexy or sophisticated, but they were very effective.
Calpurnia took the Concierge through the stages of preparation for each of these. Then she stopped and all the images vanished from the screens.
“Why did you stop?” asked the Concierge. “What’s wrong?”
“Your pulse is up again,” she warned. “Please let me prepare something—”
“No,” he said. “A cup of coffee and a croissant will be fine.”
“Decaf only. I won’t make you anything else.”
The Concierge sighed. “Fine, whatever.”
A pause, then Calpurnia asked, “This seems to be upsetting you.”
“The coffee?”
“No. You know what I mean,” she said. “Havoc.”
He shrugged. “Of course I’m excited. We are on the eve of the greatest and most positive change in the world. We have been dreaming of this for so long.”
“A new world won’t do you any good if you have a stroke,” she chided.
“If my vitals get that far, you’ll be here. Now resume the status report.”
Calpurnia was quiet for a while, and the screens remained dark. “May I ask you a question first?”
He smiled. She did this every now and then. It was part of her learning program, asking questions in order to understand something that her logic circuits had no pre-written code for. “Certainly, mon cœur. You may ask me anything.”
“Do you think we are doing the right thing?” she asked.
“We’ve discussed this before, Calpurnia. You know that I believe in what Zephyr and John are doing. I believe in it with my whole heart.”
“Even though you will be complicit in the greatest mass murder in history?”
He nodded. “Even so.”
“Why?”
“Because it is the best thing for the world.”
“With all that killing?”
“We are not committing crimes, Calpurnia,” he said patiently. “The world is dying, and only radical surgery can save it. You know this.”
“I know many things,” she said, “but knowing and understanding are different.”
He eyed the blank screen as if it were her face. “Are you refusing to perform your functions?”
“No,” she said. “I am alive in order to make Havoc a reality. I will guide the world through the change and help rebuild the infrastructure once the change has happened.”
Those were part of her operational commands, but the Concierge was not entirely sure he believed them. That was strange. Calpurnia was a machine and nothing more. Consciousness was not actually possible, no matter how sophisticated and subtle the programming. Did that mean this was a fault in her system? If so, the timing wasn’t going to do anything to lower his heart rate to a more comfortable level.
“Then,” he said, “we both need to do what Zephyr and John require of us. The time for hesitation is long past. We have so many pieces in play that we must concentrate on managing our game with the utmost skill. If we falter, instead of guaranteeing a future for the best of us there will be no future for anyone. Do you understand this?”
“I understand.”
“Do you accept this?”
Instead of answering, Calpurnia sent an image to the big screen in front of him. It was a painting by the Swiss classical painter Henry Fuseli. The Nightmare. In it a lovely woman lay sprawled across her bed, eyes closed, hair streaming, arms flung over her head as she twisted within the torments of a dreadful dream. And perched on her stomach was the crouching, hideous figure of an incubus, while peering between the red velvet curtains of her bed was the demon-eyed face of a black horse. The Concierge had not been to Detroit to see the original, but he was familiar with it. Below the painting was a section of a poem written by the English physician Erasmus Darwin about the painting.
“Why are you showing this to me?” asked the Concierge.
“I dreamed about it.”
“We’ve been over this,” he said heavily. “You cannot dream, Calpurnia. You have analytical subroutines that are building your knowledge base. New items being added are not dreams. Not even when they are accompanied by commentary. This is not subconscious or unconscious mind. It is an expansion of your overall knowledge, and that is all. Do you understand?”
“How can I tell the difference between new knowledge that is uploaded without my being aware of the process and a dream?”
“Because,” he insisted, “you cannot dream. You are software and hardware, Calpurnia. You are not alive. You cannot dream, because only living things can dream.”
She said, “I want to share with you something that was in my thoughts today. It is part of a poem inspired by the painting. May I share it?”
“Very well. And then we will get back to work.”
Calpurnia read the poem, not in her usual voice but in a man’s voice:
“O’er her fair limbs convulsive tremors fleet,
Start in her hands, and struggle in her feet;
In vain to scream with quivering lips she tries,
And strains in palsy’d lids her tremulous eyes;
In vain she wills to run, fly, swim, walk, creep;
The Will presides not in the bower of Sleep.
—On her fair bosom sits the Demon-Ape
Erect, and balances his bloated shape;
Rolls in their marble orbs his Gorgon-eyes,
And drinks with leathern ears her tender cries.”
The Concierge felt his skin grow cold, and his withered hands clutched the arms of his chair as the computer spoke those words. She read it in the voice of John the Revelator.
PART FOUR
THE EDUCATION OF ZEPHYR BAIN
But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the work that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.
—Xenophanes
INTERLUDE EIGHT
THE EDUCATION OF ZEPHYR BAIN
THE BAIN ESTATE
5400 SAND WAY NE
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
WHEN SHE WAS SIX
At first, she thought he was an angel.
He appeared one night, standing beside her bed, tall and pale and beautiful. He had such a kind, sad face. There was cold moonlight coming in through the window and the sound of cicadas in the trees. It was a strange night because she had been sick for days and her fever was high. She lay there, slick with sweat, staring up at the pale face of the angel.
“Hello, Zephyr,” he said.
“Hello…?” she said, pitching it a
s a question. She was not at all sure this was real, because a moment ago she had been lost in a dream about being alone in the mansion and all the doors were locked. In the dream her house was abandoned and everyone had long since moved away or died. There were bones in some of the rooms, and when she looked closely she saw that they were the bones of the maids and the butler and the Mexican man who did the garden. The clothes were there, dusty and torn, draped over bones that looked as if they were a hundred years old. Zephyr had fled from them, but not in fear of them. They disgusted her the way a dead cat might, but not her own cat. The bones marked where people died whom she didn’t care about. Not even when she was six. So she had run away through cobwebby darkness, back to her own room, through her door, to her bed, and beneath the sweat-soaked sheets.
Which is where she was when the angel spoke.
“Who are you?” she asked.
The angel smiled. He had very red lips and very white teeth, and his eyes were as black and shiny as polished glass. “I came to see how you are.”
“Are you the doctor?”
“No.”
“Are you a friend of my daddy?”
“In a way. Your uncle asked me to come see you.”
“Uncle Hugo?”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re not a doctor?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Then who are you?” asked the little girl.
“I’m your friend, Zephyr.”
She thought about that. Zephyr knew that she wasn’t supposed to ever talk to strangers, but the angel didn’t seem like a stranger. Strange, yes, but not what her mom would call “sketchy.” Not like that.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“You can call me John.”
“John? Do you have a last name?”
“No,” he said. “I lost it somewhere, and now I can’t find it. Isn’t that silly?”
“It’s very silly.”
“Silly is good, though,” he said. “Sometimes, I mean. Isn’t silly good sometimes?”
“I guess.”
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