by Bart Kosko
Haddad walked to the far side of the command room and brought up the royal screen. King Fahd would be waiting for his call and so would the monarch’s advisors.
The noise wall fluttered around him in a signal mirage.
He thought of what he would tell the monarch. The Azers posed no threat to Saudi Arabia. That was the main point. And he was not sure the Sunnis in Iraq would let the missiles pass. He might be wrong but then there would be the Syrians to deal with and maybe even the Israelis themselves.
Either way it would be fun to watch.
Chapter 42
Mojave Desert
Nevada
Eytan Baum pulled a small clear cube from his coat and fit it into the data port of the PDA he held in his left hand. The pseudocrystal cube was a lithium volume hologram. It could store almost as much data as could a large book-filled library.
The cubes still had not reached their full storage limit of one bit of information per cubic wavelength of light. But the engineers were closing in on that Van Heerdan bound. Each quantum 1 or 0 lay inside a light cube whose edge length was little more than two light wavelengths.
The PDA lit the base of the cube in a rainbow of colors as it matched the cube’s data paths to its wavelength multiplexer. Each data path had its own color. The rainbow moved at the speed of light and defined a superdense bundle of data paths.
Eytan held the PDA and cube next to John’s left ear. Then he pushed down on the pad for wireless transmission.
John jumped at the knowledge rush.
It felt as if he had just read a thousand good books. He saw the data and felt it and knew it without trying to understand it. The flash of insight was on the order of a mental nuclear blast.
Eytan’s roiling cloud of cigar smoke froze.
John’s thoughts speeded up and he passed through the window eilat desalination plant so fast that it seemed like a train ride through a tunnel of red and blue and green windows. He could will his mind speed to slow or grow somewhat but he saw no reason to do so.
John felt for his body and could not find it. The nerve signals traveled too slowly to add much new data to his mind’s eye.
His mind speed grew until it almost matched the speed of the data entry.
The knowledge rush sculpted the great curved surface of his mind. The white sky of his mind’s eye gave way to a blue sky with thousands of red and white and green stars that blinked on and off. The stars changed colors as they blinked but did not move. John focused on one star and saw part of the blueprint for an electric turbine.
The knowledge rush came to an end in a vast spiderweb of lines and nodes.
John knew enough about data structures to see it was a causal belief web or cognitive map. Each line edge had its binary header data and its own color. A line between two nodes stood for how much the first node increased or decreased the second. Header bits described the nature of the increase or decrease. The map had fuzzy submaps where the color shade stood for the degree of causal strength and where many of the lines formed complex feedback loops.
John zoomed in on the node called plant design.
It opened into a new knowledge web. He could see all the new nodes at the same time and still see all the nodes of the parent web. He could also see Eytan and the smoke that did not move in the air.
John opened some of the nodes. He found nested blueprints of the water plant and nested organization charts of the hundreds of Israeli workers who had run the Eilat desalination plant. One node opened a library of thousands of technical reports that ranged from the physics of fluids to economic forecasts and future designs for the water plant and its desert gardens and orchards.
The map node showed 2-D maps and 3-D footage of southern Israel and the plant’s road system. One map branch showed the structure of the coral reefs in the nearby Gulf of Aqaba in the northern Red Sea. The Israelis had mapped all visible surface areas and mapped even the seismic patterns of their land and the seabed.
Then John watched video clips of the plant staff. Some clips showed how they briefed the press and the government on the status of hydrogen fuel in Israel. He found one clip where Eytan spoke in a dark room to a large crowd. John saw his name and the Black Sun patent on the holoscreen. They were mere bullets in one of Eytan’s view graphs.
The clip gave him an idea.
Eytan might not have had time to filter all the data in the cube. That was the problem with shifting hundreds of thousands of large files. No one could fully control content.
So maybe they could not fully control him.
A red message flashed that said data transfer complete.
John had thought that it had ended with the knowledge web. He looked at the whole web and saw it shrink to one of the windows inside the plant design window. He willed the window to open and the web appeared just as if he had seen it. That gave him a sense of control and even a slight thrill. The thrill was in his mind and not in the adrenal flashes that used to flood his heart and muscles and meat brain.
He had power now even if he might be a prisoner in his own skull. There would be ways he could defend himself and maybe deal with Eytan or the CIA or the Department of Energy. He had the nanotime and the knowledge to figure it out. First he had to see what the Israelis could tell him about himself and about one Dr. Hamid Tabriz.
Then he would have to reach back to the nineteenth century and his wallet and bring back the software ghost of John Stuart Mill.
Chapter 43
Near Abaq
Inner Mongolia
People’s Republic of China
The time had come for Major Yu to report the old man.
Yu’s friends in Shanghai had told him to do it. And his friends in Beijing had told him that now they all watched Feng. They wanted to see how he would wield the forces of Abaq against the Russians. This was Yu’s first chance to secure a field command. But the old man just stayed in the barn and played with his pony.
The old fool gave him no choice.
Yu went back to the barn for the last time. He had to confront the old man before he filed his report with Beijing. He could go around the old man on the wireless nets with Beijing and Shanghai as long as he kept it verbal. The Chinese Army would not accept the same thing in writing. They already knew about his problem with Old Flat Face.
The problem was the procedure. Yu had to state his complaint to General Feng and then ask his permission to file it. It was a bold move. Yu believed the powers in Beijing would back him. And fortune favors the brave.
Yu found the old man brushing his red pony in a stall.
Yu did not like the smell of the horses and the stale yellow wheat straw. At least the old man was alone and so no one could contest his claims. Yu had to open and close a row of new wooden doors to get to him. Wood was scarce in China but this wood was spruce from the great forests in Siberia that the Japanese had logged. Yu’s men had traded only a few boxes of dynamite for it.
“General Feng?”
The old man did not look at Yu or stop passing the badger-hair brush over the coat of the red pony. Feng patted the small horse with his left hand and held the thick oak handle of the brush with his right hand.
“General Feng. I must speak to you. General Qi still has not heard from you. Beijing has placed the army on alert. They expect us to send a message to the Russians. Their satellites are watching us. General Feng. It is my duty to report your inaction to General Qi and the Beijing Command.”
There. He had called out the old bastard.
Yu paused and felt the sweat start to bead at his temples.
He waited for the old man to lose his temper or at least defend himself. Feng only moved the brush from the side of the pony to the pony’s hip. Maybe the old man had lost his nerve as well as his mind.
Yu stepped closer to him and the pony whinnied.
“General Feng. Beijing demands an answer. What shall I tell them? You are too busy cleaning a horse to perform your duties?”
Yu had
said it now and he was glad that he had. He should have stood up to this old fool long before. He exhaled his contempt through his nose and shook his head. He started to think how he would tell the story of the scared old man to his friends in Beijing and Shanghai.
Major Yu smiled and turned to leave.
Then Feng hit him with the back of the oak brush. The blow came in a large arc and caved in the back of the young man’s skull and dropped him to his knees.
The pony whinnied again.
Feng stood still to watch the young man crumple slowly forward.
Yu had not bled at first but now the dark-red blood poured out in pulses onto the straw. A large brown horsefly circled the blood and landed in it.
Feng rubbed the back of the brush with the palm of his hand. There was no blood on it.
The devious young man had been so foolish as to let a pony kick him in the head. General Feng knew no one would ask him what the young man had been looking for in the straw.
Chapter 44
Tel Aviv
Israel
“You were wrong,” Sharon said. “Mazel tov.”
“It makes no sense. They have to know we can track them.”
Colonel Hurwicz watched the war screen as he spoke to the Prime Minister. The eight Azeri stealth cruise missiles were over Syrian airspace and had split into two swarms of four. One swarm continued on toward Tel Aviv. The other swarm peeled off and turned southwest toward Eilat.
“Colonel Hurwicz. Can you repel the strike?”
“Yes. With high confidence.”
“How high will your confidence be if they split again and each go their own way?”
“We can track eight missiles. The American satellites are tracking them for us for backup. We can deflect and decoy any missiles we can’t shoot down.”
“I cannot risk the safety of this nation on your guesses. Shin Bet tells me the Palestinians knew about this strike. They have already called a media rally. They will say that we have brought the wrath of Allah on them and they may well be right. I will not risk more riots in the Strip and West Bank.”
“That is out of my hands,” Hurwicz said.
“Wrong again. We will not let our enemies attack us a second time with impunity. You will launch a stealth air strike on Baku.”
“That would make less sense than their strike.”
“You will have the stealth missiles fly up the sea and across Turkey,” Sharon said. “The Americans will help us secure their passage across Turkey.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Give the launch order or resign your command.”
Chapter 45
Mojave Desert
Nevada
Cyberspace
John thought of the white face and black beard of Hamid Tabriz. The face formed on the main node of a new belief web amid the thousands of file windows. John scanned the web and opened some of the video nodes.
Tabriz sat in meditation with his white-robed followers.
John had to look at the edge of the moving 3-D image to see that it was only an image. The more he thought of the image the better he could see it and hear it and even smell it.
Then a young Tabriz sat in a Turkish jail cell. An older Tabriz stood with a Japanese graduate student and used a fiber-optic probe to poke the exposed pink brain of a grinning rhesus monkey. John could see the brown teeth of the monkey and its coarse brown and gray hair.
Then a mature Tabriz sat at a table with a second bruised man. A young woman ripped the duct tape off their mouths and the second man yelled “Little bitch!” at her. The image soon flashed white when the superdense C-4 went off. Then a helicopter shined its spotlight on the gray smoking ruins of the building in Sa’ad.
John searched through more of the nodes until he found a large red cube covered with black Hebrew letters.
The Hebrew melted into English: idf top secret. special access required.
Behind the red cube lay hundreds and then thousands more just like it. He tried to will the contents of some of the red cubes. Large black question marks appeared on some of the cubes and next to them grew some of his willed best guesses: IDF files on Tabriz covert operations. Files on hydroplants in the United States and Brazil and China and India. IDF files on the upcoming Hoover demo. Files on the control of John Grant. Files on John Grant’s IDF mission.
John focused on the last guess but could not get it to expand. He looked away to Eytan and the frozen cigar smoke and the dark cherry wood of the desert trailer. Eytan could not stop him. Then he looked back to the thousands of secret red cubes that the Israelis had hidden in his mind.
John drew back to think. He would have closed his eyes if he could.
He drew far back in mental space and saw the bulk of his mind again as the huge writhing vortex on the curved surface. The sides of the purplish vortex contained thin stripes of color in fractal fingers.
He zoomed down the snaking vortex and into a strip of turquoise. The strip opened into its own greenish vortex. He zoomed down it and did not know what the vortex or its sides meant. Yet he had full control to dive down the vortex or through it. He dove through a blue stripe and came back out of the main purplish vortex and then understood.
His will shaped his mind. It could shape the curved surface as well as move along it. John could focus his attention and his mind would give way. He could will a mood or action or scene and his mind would change to bring it about. His will warped the mind sheet and its labyrinth of knowledge vortices.
He thought of free will.
John recalled the debates over free will he had watched in the media as the VR games had become more real and as more of the brain’s neural secrets gave way to the cold math of science. Parents once worried that their kids would act out some of the sex and violence that they saw on TV. Those worries grew when kids could wear VR suits and goggles and then rape or murder their teachers or even their parents. Surveys and studies showed for more than a decade that the growth in some violent crimes tracked the growth in VR viewing. Many social scientists argued that free will shrank to some degree as VR and multimedia viewing grew.
John did not believe in a free will in a strict sense. He wanted a will that he could control. He did not want a ghost that did not obey laws of cause and effect. A free will just meant no one constrained him even if all the atoms in the universe conspired to direct his will.
John wanted to do as he pleased even if he could not please as he pleased.
That held when Eytan had tied him down in the van and it held here in the data space of patterns and vortices. His will no longer had a base in flesh and endocrine glands unless he chose to slow down and think in seconds instead of nanoseconds. His genes and glands and training had formed his patterns of will and mind. He was no more than those patterns and had never been anything but those patterns. Now the chip in his skull had set those patterns free.
And they were old patterns borne of meat. John wondered what new patterns the future would bring. The raw sense data could now produce far richer and more complex thoughts.
John watched Eytan’s cigar smoke with his right eye until he saw a slight rise and fold in the smoke. He realized that he had answered the question he had not yet asked.
How could he die now?
John would die when his patterns ceased or dispersed.
He could die in degrees if the Israelis or the CIA or Tabriz deleted his files and reduced or changed his patterns. They could cut his body to ribbons now and that would not kill him. John did not want to lose his body but he knew the desire came more from habit than from reason. All he needed was a good power source and some data ports and actuators. He could not even use a body when he thought at these speeds.
The Israelis could unplug him and no doubt they planned to do so. Maybe the red cubes told they could shut him down from within. He would never know it if they shut off his power all at once. They might already have done it to test his chip. Sleep could act the same way to a meat mind. Mi
llions of patients had closed their eyes before surgery and had in the next mental instant opened their eyes hours after the surgery.
John could survive a shutdown. He could not survive a pattern smashing unless he made a backup. But how could he back up himself?
Jism would know how to back him up.
Jism could help him make hundreds or millions of backups. Tabriz had shown that you could even put your mind pattern in someone else’s body. Tabriz murdered people to do it.
Maybe he could too.
The thought shocked John but did not go away. He could kill someone and take their body. The thought tempted him and he soon found ways to defend it. He could take the body of someone who tried to kill him. He could buy the body of a convict on death row. He could put a copy of his mind into the body of a third-world dictator.
The person would still get what was coming to him but would have the bonus of staying in the gene pool. John could pass on their genes for them. He had only to copy himself or his backup to spread his patterns through the world of bits.
John knew such thoughts were just his way of showing how misery loved company. He had to be careful. His new and more complex mind could deceive itself in more complex ways. He had lost his brain and still lived and still wanted to live. Life had always been about not dying. Now he had to respect those still trapped in their flesh. He had new powers but would still trade his chip mind for his old meat mind if there were a way to do it. John thought he could not feel the loss in his gut but his chip mind supplied that sensation for him. He willed the feeling and soon there it was.
Then John willed that the sense of loss pass to a feeling of triumph. His mind obeyed. He had all the emotions he would ever want to play with. But this was not the time for it. He had to get the Israelis out of his mind in a very real sense. He had to keep both his mind and his flesh alive long enough to do that.
John did not want his chip to end up on Eytan’s key chain.