by Bart Kosko
Chapter 46
Above the Negev Desert
Israel
Lieutenant Ya’akov Ehud had to bring down the last missile.
The Israelis had used almost 100 SAMs to knock out seven of the eight Azer cruise missiles. Hurwicz had tried to take them out over the western fringe of Syrian airspace but the effort had failed. The missiles had enough stealth to evade the SAMs at close range.
Bomb sirens had gone off in Israel and Palestine. Then molten steel and plastic fell from the skies as the SA-10/18 SAMs hit or missed their targets. WNN now claimed there were over 100 casualties outside of Tel Aviv from a Patriot-3 missile that had misfired and crashed into a row of limestone shops and homes.
The world’s defense industry watched this second test in two days of the Israeli air-defense system.
Now the talking satellites in high-earth orbit watched Ehud try to bring down the last missile alive. The IDF wanted at least one stealth missile to study.
Ehud flew a revamped F-22 stealth bomber alone. He wore his wings on black since he had trained as a commando to parachute-jump into water. He hoped he would not see water on this flight. That would mean he had failed. The state had spent too much tax money on this stealth bomber and his training to let that happen. That would also make for some bad gin and tonics at the officers’ club. He had spent too many hundreds of hours in the virtual-reality cockpit simulators to miss this chance at real field combat.
The stealth missile flew low over the Negev Desert toward the diving resort city of Eilat on the Red Sea. Ehud had only seconds left to force the radar-guided missile to land in the brown and gray desert. His F-22 would fire a volley of antistealth AIM-150 missiles if he failed. The Israelis would in turn launch a final volley of SAMs if his onboard missiles failed.
Ehud dropped a large cloud of gold flakes and dust where both his computer and those on the ground told him the missile would pass in a few seconds. He pulled a fast five-g loop and came down behind and above the missile as it passed through the radar-nulling cloud of gold.
Ehud held the missile in his wireless beam. He grimaced because there was not enough time to reprogram the missile’s guidance logic. Tel Aviv should have already done that. Perhaps that was why they wanted to study this missile. The Azers had found some satellite comm codes that the Israelis could not crack.
There was one thing Ehud could do to confuse the missile.
He jammed the lower portion of its radar and fed it false radar signatures from above. The smart cruise missile turned downward sharply as it passed through the cloud of gold dust. It would crash into the desert floor if it turned too sharply. Ehud hoped the missile would skid to a stop and stay in one piece.
Israeli air defense sent a brief but massive jamming signal across the Negev to jam all the GPS satellite signals in that area.
Ehud saw the red flash on his heads-up display as his GPS navigator went out. The GPS blackout did not seem to affect the cruise missile. It started to rise up from the desert floor and bounced its own radar off the graphite skin of the F-22.
Ehud closed in on the missile from above.
Ground control told him to fire his AIMs but he did not want to admit failure. Combat air time was too precious and the VR training too long and boring.
He still had his 480-round M61A2 Gatling gun. So he opened fire with it. The fire control unit aimed the bursts of 20-mm rounds for him. The heads-up display showed a direct hit on one of the missile’s tail fins.
The missile spun about its long axis but did not give up its course.
Ehud brought the F-22 closer to the smart missile and fired a new burst. He heard ground control scream at him to abort.
Then there was nothing.
The cruise missile had deduced his presence and its own doomed plight. Its adaptive mission logic knew that it would not make it to its target in Eilat. So in a microsecond it picked a new target in flight.
The $10,000 missile slowed. Then it blew up beneath the F-22 and took the half-billion-dollar stealth bomber with it.
Chapter 47
Baku
Azerbaijan
General Atef Mosarian had not left the control room since he had launched the missile attack against the Israelis.
He had had two doctors sent in to tend to the bullet wound. The slug had torn through his stomach and lodged in his right kidney. Both doctors told him he had to go to the hospital for surgery and fresh plasma. Mosarian feared for his safety and would not leave the control room. He did not want the rioting people of Baku to know that someone had shot him.
And he did not know what the Russians would do. They might seize any excuse to invade.
Mosarian also did not want the Iranians to know he could die. He tried to reach Ambassador Esfahani at his home and at the embassy. The staff said they did not know where he was. Mosarian knew they lied and knew that was all the worse for him and his coup. He had sent his young aide to gather men and search the city and find Esfahani.
Then he had called Keiko at his own home. The news of the coup had scared her and she cried when she saw his feverish face and the blood smears on his hands and green uniform. She too had not heard from Esfahani.
Mosarian had to admit now that the Iranians had deceived him.
The Iranians had promised him air support and ground troops if he needed them to secure the coup against the Armenians and the Russians. Some mullah must have double-crossed Esfahani. They might even have had him shot for putting Iran at risk of a Russian skirmish. Mullahs had people shot all the time for less cause.
Now he had to sit and watch the world denounce him on WNN and wait for his own men to storm the control room. Even the young recruit Gaidar Hasimov looked at him with doubt when he told the young man to call Esfahani again. Mosarian had been like an uncle to Gaidar and hired him as a favor to Gaidar’s father. But the stocky young man gave too much weight to what the Americans said.
Mosarian closed his eyes and tried to calm himself and look at matters as a general should. At least he had shown the world that Azerbaijan could hit back.
World powers had played their Great Game here for over a century and never thought about the country or its people. They just fought one another for the oil. And the sneaky Israelis thought they could kill their President and get away with it. It did not matter that the Israelis had shot down all eight of the Azer cruise missiles. The world had learned that Azerbaijan was a power and it would always hit back. It would have justice.
And now he was the power.
Atef had wanted to be President since he was a boy in the oil fields and had watched his father cap wells for the Russians and Germans. Even then he wanted the power to take their wells and send the Communist bastards home under pain of death.
Then they came again as capitalists. They bought the Azer women like whores and hired the Armenian Christians who then bought guns to kill Azer men. For years he had to watch the politicians bow to the foreign money and the corporations and let them keep playing their Game.
He should have seized power long ago. He could have stopped the rape of the Azer oil fields and the murder of the young Azer men. His men would have supported him. The Japanese would never have dared pollute the Caspian if he had been President instead of that atheist worm Aminzadeh.
Now he had to pay for his weakness.
The power came too late. Atef Mosarian was the supreme commander of the Republic of Azerbaijan. And it came to nothing but pain. The sour feeling in his stomach had turned to a gnawing pain in his bowels. Great flashes of pain ran up and down his back and legs. The pain flashes had twice made him cry out like a child in front of his men. He felt cold and stiff and his thirst seemed to grow by the minute.
That was the way of life.
Pleasure never felt as good as you thought it would feel. Pain always felt worse than you thought it would.
He did not want to admit that now he would trade his power to be healthy again. He would trade it to be strong again. He
would trade it to make love to Keiko one more time on the black silk bedspread. Soon that trade would be all he could think of.
So maybe he should take the Beretta out of its holster and end it himself. The pain was getting worse. The blood still seeped out through the white gauze and pooled on the floor.
Mosarian heard more voices now but he did not open his eyes. Gaidar would tell him if there was news of Esfahani. He was too tired now to rise.
Mosarian just hoped they would remember him as a martyr of his people and not a tyrant who had seized power and fallen on his sword. The press would paint him that way. On WNN the Americans had already called him “a bloodthirsty enemy of democracy” and “the latest oil madman.”
The Americans could go to hell. No one listened to them now as they had done when Atef was a boy.
At least he had made it to Japan and lived there in school when he was young. He thought how beautiful it was in Kyoto in the spring. It would rain softly through the maple and cedar trees and it was not hot enough to make him sweat under his shirt. He thought how much he would like Keiko to mix him the strong whipped green tea and perform her tea ceremony for him. The tea would be hot and bitter. Right now he saw it as cool and sweet and wanted to drink his fill of it.
“General! General!” young Gaidar shouted at him.
“What?” Mosarian said.
Mosarian fought his way out of his reverie. He tried to stand with his Beretta but fell back down into the chair. He wanted to yell at the man for his tone but was too tired.
“We have detected a stealth raid,” Gaidar said. “We are under attack!”
“The Russians?”
“It looks as if they sneaked in through Turkey. The stealth signature looks Israeli.”
“The Israelis? Here?”
Mosarian heard the cluster bombs explode on the airstrip as he said it.
He tried again to stand but a loud concussion wave slammed him to the ground. Part of the screen wall fell on top of him. He pushed the plastic strips off him and winced at the pain in his stomach and side. His ears rang and he heard men screaming but he still managed to raise himself on his left elbow. Much of the roof opened to smoking gray sky.
Then he saw it.
One of the four red sensor-fused bomblets had drilled through the remains of the control room and sat before him on the floor. The bomblet sat idle for more than a second as Mosarian jumped to his feet.
Then it leveled the rubble.
Chapter 48
Mojave Desert
Nevada
Cyberspace
John watched Denise try to kill him in her cabin in Wrightwood. The space paintings turned into Hamid Tabriz’s face. His own hand reached through her cracked skull and the black foam and then all went black.
John did not like the image and sped through a blue vortex to find an older memory. He pushed down new thoughts as he searched. Something told him that he could think in millions of dimensions and did not have to limit himself to these cheap 3-D projections of his true mind surface. That was a big thought and it would have to wait.
Right now John dove through the wall of a vortex where he knew he would find one of his best moments. He still did not know how he would find it. He just knew he would. It was the night that Denise and he had at last gotten Richard out of his warehouse for a few hours and had first made love.
John had the power to play the 3-D image sequence at any speed and start it at any point. He could edit it by his will and so pursue new paths of cause and effect. The image was far more vivid than the pale thoughts and dreams he had had in his meat mind. He could feel and taste and smell and touch as well as see and hear. But back then the effect was never more than a vivid lucid dream since he always knew it was a dream.
This was real.
There might be a way to reduce the conscious sense but he could not find it. The help files showed him only how to edit files or download databases that he did not have. He could not find the metafiles that would show the blueprints and pseudoneural wiring diagrams of his chip brain.
John could not even confirm that his chip brain would dream if he did not will it to dream. His mind might stagnate without fresh stimuli. Or it might use random search to create new patterns and thoughts just as the neurons in real neural nets still fired at random when no signal fired them.
The sex scenes with Denise held his attention the first six times John lived through them. He missed her and her laugh and smile and her firm breasts and fine white ass. Yet the longing was but a shadow of the longing he had felt the day before.
The chip filled in the thought with a type of feeling if he held the thought long enough. But he had to climb inside a scene to feel all the emotions at their full hormonal peak. His mind had no tie to his flesh and glands at these speeds. He had already begun to forget his body frozen in the slow microseconds of neural talk and blood flow and muscle contractions.
They could kill his body now and John would survive it. They had already killed his brain and yet he lived. How important was a lung or foot next to a brain? So why not trade in the old car for a new and better one? John could help them clone him a new body from his old DNA. Or he could make do with the new robot actuators. He would prevail as long as he had his mind and his patterns.
But the state might want to delete him and so might Tabriz. That bastard had started all this. Tabriz would want to delete him now just to protect his chiphead secrets. And Tabriz was a lot smarter than the CIA or the Israelis. It came down to who could first flip the other’s switch. He would have to delete Tabriz before Tabriz deleted him.
That thought relieved some mental tension.
The vortices seemed to wriggle less and held their shape better in his mind surface.
He had the first steps of a plan. He would get Jism and make backup copies of himself and figure out a way to delete Tabriz. Maybe Jism could help him. Jism had his own files and wireless access to millions of databases. John would find out what Jism could do when Eytan slowed him back down to meat speed. The question was whether he could find one of the raisins.
Right now John thought he deserved to play.
He wanted to see if he could dream scenes that he had not lived before. He thought first how good the green honeydew melon had tasted the day before with Catton and Rittenhouse. He did not feel the fatigue now that he had felt then and did not want to recall it. John just thought about the sweet green flesh of the melon.
A new vortex opened and he found himself in a rocky brown cave filled with piles of melons and pears and apples and mangos. The cave held all the fruit he used to buy at the markets in Los Angeles. The watermelon tasted sweet and firm.
This told him that his chip mind must use and tune its own intelligent agents. The agents did not have personalities like his John Stuart Mill or Richard’s Sun Tzu. They just did their job of learning what he liked or might like and searching for it through millions of stored databases. He would will an image and the agents would filter databases and image libraries to best fit John’s stored preference maps.
John looked down at his tanned muscular body as he ate. The melons turned to piles of drug powders and pills that looked like emeralds in a sultan’s cave. He ate the drugs by the handful and felt the waves of warmth flow through his body and watched his body grow leaner and more defined. The right bicep grew as he contracted it.
The drugs kicked in with greater force and he saw the bloody egg with his son float to him across the cave. The red blood gave way to the screaming faces of Eytan and Moshe and Catton and Rittenhouse. He had them all trapped inside the egg and shrank it until their heads popped. The egg lay at his feet now. It was white and the size of a chicken egg. John smashed the egg with his bare foot and felt the adrenal kill thrill shoot through his stomach and tighten his muscles.
He wanted more of this.
There were hundreds of people he felt he should kill or at least would like to kill. John knew it was not an atom murder here but his priva
te dream. So he could do as he damn pleased. The thought was not what counted.
He felt his hands strangling the neck of President Vance Jackson. He had always disliked the man. Now John watched his thumbs push in the man’s Adam’s apple. Jackson fell to the floor and struggled to stand. John smashed a crowbar through his head and kicked him out of the way.
His heart pounded. This was not like the cheap VR games he used to play. This was real and the blood was warm and salty to the taste just as his own blood was when they debrained him.
John turned and saw the First Lady run at him with a paring knife. He had never liked her either. Her clothes fell off her as she ran by him. Her sagging breasts looked like those on an old woman twice her age. He did not want to look at them.
The old breasts grew younger and firmer. Then they gave way to a cool evening in the East Mojave. Hundreds of naked young women lay on red and purple beach towels on the hard orange desert. The girls had laid their towels in groups. The blondes sat in one clump. The Asian girls sat in their clump. The black girls sat in theirs.
There were hundreds of Johns now. They walked among the spiny cholla cactus and the greasewood shrubs and lay down with the women. He felt the pounding thrill of each John in parallel and could still fly above them to watch the orgy.
John felt for a moment that he should not waste his time on such things. His chip mind defined the state of the art of information science and all he could do was give in to the law of the loins. That thought soon slipped away and John sampled his first truly parallel set of sensations.
A bolt of lightning cut through the dark blue desert sky.
The orgy scene turned white and dissolved.
John heard a buzzing in his mind. He had not heard that sound since Moshe had replaced his brain chunks with the golden chiplets. The great purple vortex collapsed to a disk on a plane and then shrank to a point.
The buzzing grew louder and so did the sound of wind. It blocked his thoughts and began to hurt but he could not find the source of the pain.