by Bart Kosko
John’s mind seemed to turn inside out. The buzzing and wind grew and turned into great explosions. He felt his mind fall through mental space and start to come apart in the thunder of the explosions.
Then came the wall of white light.
The buzzing and wind stopped. The pain and the explosions and the sense of falling stopped. There was no sound or feeling. He could not think or try to think.
He knew only the white light and the emptiness of flat space without time.
Chapter 49
Cyberspace
The Wireless News Network had now become part of the events it reported to the world. It broke the news of the Iranian invasion by showing the death of two of its field journalists in Baku.
Minutes later the Russians shelled the Yakut capital of Yakutsk.
*
WNN Channel 2: A handheld camera shows Iranian commandos running through the building of the outlawed parliament of Azerbaijan. WNN reporter Edward Fairchild tells the camera that the commandos carry death lists. Sources say that Iranian Ambassador Mossan Esfahani has drawn them up. The green-clad commandos push some of the Azer members against the wall and open fire. The camera jerks and then shows Fairchild dead on the floor. A commando runs at the camera and fires his Russian submachine gun. The image spins and then goes blank.…
*
WNN Channel 8: The Iranian ambassador to the United Nations rises to address the assembly. Members shout him down. The U.S. ambassador yields the floor to her Russian colleague. The Russian ambassador denounces the invasion and says Russia will view it as an act of war if Iran does not withdraw at once. The Chinese and Japanese ambassadors break in. They demand that Russia withdraw its troops from Yakutia.…
*
WNN Channel 9: Interrupt for late-breaking news. The announcer says that Mexican President Alejandro Juarez has just died in a car bomb explosion in Mexico City. A tourist video shows a crowd slowing the black limousine to a stop. Policemen in black riot gear rush to clear the crowd. The limousine explodes in a cloud of gray dust and the video stops. The video starts again to show over 100 persons dead or wounded. They lie in a large disk centered at the buckled and burning limousine. The announcer says that internet sources blame the Chiapas Indians in the south for the bombing. Some postings claim the bombing is part of a broader pan-American war on oil. She also says Mexico has no vice president. It may take weeks or months to hold a new election.…
*
WNN Channel 62: A Moscow special report shows Islamic riots in the Chechnyan capitol of Grozny and in small towns along the Russian border of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. The rioters claim they support Azerbaijan’s right to independence. Kazakh protesters say they will bomb Moscow’s Tenghiz oil pipeline if the Russians invade Azerbaijan. The report shows Russian troop buildups in Grozny and along the Kazakhstan border. The Moscow station cites its own poll that 72% of Muscovites think Russia should repel the Iranians and secure at least Baku for the Azeri people.…
*
WNN Channel 809: The floor of the Shanghai Stock Exchange is empty. The Chinese government closed its main exchange when it first fell below its value at the time of the Dhahran bombing two days before. China has also stopped all currency hedging and interest-rate swaps on its derivatives markets. The Tokyo Stock Exchange has lost 8% of its value since the Russian invasion of Yakutsk. The Hong Kong and Taipei Stock Exchanges have grown in value in the same time. Chinese Prime Minister Zhang Lin says the Shanghai Stock Exchange will open when “world markets and events have calmed.”…
Chapter 50
Mojave Desert
Nevada
“Having a nanodream?” Eytan said. “You’ll have plenty of time for that later. The world may still be here then.”
John was back now somehow on neural time. The smoke curled and rose again from Eytan’s thin cigar.
John had played in his mind for hours before the wall of white came. Then he had hung there for not just days but for weeks. It was just white nothingness. There were no thoughts or sensations. John did not recall when he had come back to neural time and he could not accept that only a few seconds had passed since he had gone to nanotime.
He moved his right foot just to feel it.
“Ended on a bang. Didn’t it?” Eytan said.
“No. There was no ending. There was nothing.”
“Barrage jam. We use it sometimes to white out a fighter jet’s EW eyes. Juice up the whole spectrum or as much of it as you can. What you just felt was a low-grade but focused barrage jam. Bet it played hell with your daydreaming. Go ahead. Call up the window.”
John saw the barrage jam window in mind space.
It came to him with almost no effort. The mind walk through nanotime had taught him many things. He could hear Eytan speak but he did not care what he said just as he did not care to open the barrage jam window.
John could tell that some of the curvature had returned to his mind surface. Now he wished he had explored those higher dimensions. Maybe what he saw now in his 3-D mind’s eye was just the intersection of mental objects of much higher dimension.
He nodded to Eytan to confirm the window.
“Good. Save that one for Tabriz. I have the battery pack with me.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“Hell no. But that’s not the reason. Your chip doesn’t have the power to sustain a barrage jam across all frequencies. And I don’t want you to burn up your own candle that fast. I just want you to focus the jam when the time is right. Jam him and keep jamming him until we can take him apart or at least take him down.”
John understood and still did not care.
He tried to go back to nanotime but could not will it or find the right help files. He had to get Jism to help him. The best he could do was to find the purple vortex again. John dove into it just to explore and to try to bring back the lucid dreams that now seemed so distant in time. He wanted to see Denise again and eat the fruit and take the drugs in the cave. He wanted to have his fill of the desert orgy as the evening passed to night.
Then a white flash filled his mind.
John grabbed his forehead with both hands to counter the splitting pain.
Eytan stubbed out his cigar and put the PDA control unit in his tan jacket.
“They’re waiting,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“Not yet. I have to eat something first.”
“Hurry up.”
Eytan pulled a second cigar from his front pocket and lit it.
“Can’t believe you live in a place that has no windows,” he said. “It’s like a tank.”
John walked to the small refrigerator behind the counter and kneeled down to open it. His temples throbbed when he knelt. The Israelis had some way to keep the pain channels active.
The orange juice looked good and so did the grilled chicken breasts wrapped in Saran Wrap. His body craved protein as well as carbohydrates. But this was no time for meat over mind.
The backup raisin still sat at the bottom of the small carton of orange juice where he had left it. He just hoped it could talk to the raisin in his wallet once he swallowed it.
Chapter 51
Eilat
Israel
The Tabriz Sufi brotherhood had achieved something no other religious sect had. It now had more bodies than members.
The bodies came from gene lines that had split and moved apart in genome space. The bodies themselves were leaves on the human gene tree. Nature and man had pruned the gene tree for millions of years. Hunger and disease and battle had pruned old branches while love and rape and adultery had grown new branches. This gave the leaves a fierce sense of cunning and independence that no religion had fully conquered.
But they had all tried.
The Sufi cult had found how to conquer the gene tree. It had beaten all the thousands of other cults that competed with it for mind control and the thousands of cults that had come before it.
The Sufi cult did not try to subvert or persuade t
he mind in the brain as the other cults did. It just replaced the brain with its own chip. The Sufis had crossed a new threshold of religious evolution. Their power did not come from their goals or ideas or motives.
Their power came from being first.
Now the bodies walked on neural time and took their orders on chip time.
A teenage Israeli girl with short black hair finished her shore dive in the Red Sea. She walked with her mask in her hand on the new white sand that the resort owners had just dumped on the Eilat beach. She did not know how many of her chip mates had like missions at that moment. She lived only to do her duty and to obey her God.
All the recruits felt that way.
An old recruit helped unload frozen yellowfin tunas from a trawler in Fukuoka Harbor in view of the new prefecture hydropower plant. A Hindu recruit walked his security beat on the grounds of the desalination plant in Madras. A Cantonese recruit docked his junk in Hong Kong Harbor and walked the long sidewalk toward the mirrored buildings of the new energy research park. A Chinese recruit walked with the other tourists and watched the brown water of the Yangtze gush beneath him on the new Three Gorges Dam.
The mind of most of the chips was only part of the mind of the brotherhood. The Sufi members had joined their own chip minds in a common chip net. There was no need to share that much thought with the forced recruits.
The recruits needed to glimpse only enough of the group mind to do their duty and to stay in wireless touch with their cell leaders. Their recruitment had come at great expense to the Sufi brotherhood.
The tragedy was that they would be gone so soon.
Chapter 52
Near Abaq
Inner Mongolia
People’s Republic of China
General Feng walked outside to watch the cruise missiles launch in the distant desert. They were far away but the noise still hit him like the roar of jets taking off on a runway. The noise would spook his red pony and the other horses in the barns.
He would bring the pony a last bunch of the yellow carrots before he left and the arms depot exploded.
General Qi could contact him as they drove north.
Then he would take the call and tell him nothing. Let Qi try to stop the smart missiles. Qi would not even know which ones he had launched and which ones had blown up with the compound. Cruise missiles were not like the old ICBMs they kept in underground silos.
Cruise missiles lay in stockpiles at most of the Chinese army bases. Some of the devious young men in the army even sold them on the black market to the new warlords in the north and in Punjab and Africa. Qi could no more account for the 200 missiles that Feng had launched than he could account for the thousands of .45 caliber rounds the young men of the Abaq depot fired each week at the bull’s-eye targets to keep up their marksmanship.
General Qi would not worry so much when he saw that the missiles went north and not south.
Feng was pleased.
His instincts had proved right again. The world was truly coming apart. And the fools in Beijing and Shanghai thought that he had not paid attention. This was the right time to act.
Now he had only to figure out how to get the red pony with him on the plane.
Chapter 53
The Hoover Dam
Boulder City
Nevada
John. You must keep turning your head to scan with the right eye. I can process the infra-red signals but I cannot control your spinal column.
You’re damn right you can’t control my spinal column. Don’t even try.
The small auditorium was dark but John could see the greenish glow of their faces as they watched him speak.
Ramachandra was not there. John could not decide whether the Americans or the Israelis had gotten rid of him. There was a good chance that they had just sent him home for a free day of vacation as they had many others. John could recognize only a few of the greenish faces in the small crowd.
He tried not to touch the plastic scars on his scalp but he could not help it. It had become a nervous tic. He touched the thin ridges above his ear to confirm what they had done to him.
He also touched the thin ridges with a slight sense of pride.
John felt much better now that Jism sat with him in his mind’s eye. Jism had shown him how to vary his mental speed and how to learn from the help files without wasting space in his mind’s eye to read them.
Jism had also shown him how to enhance the neural signals in his body to find the raisin in his small intestine. They had transferred its contents through the wireless ports but John still wanted to know where it was. He wanted to know a lot of things about the inside of his body. It made him think how learning to scuba dive had changed how he looked at lakes and oceans.
The best part was that no one knew about Jism.
Eytan had not seen him swallow the raisin and had not understood the grunts John had used at first to get the raisin in his stomach to talk to the one in his wallet. Eytan still had John’s wallet in his coat pocket. Jism was his ace in the hole. John had something the Israelis did not have and knew something they did not know. The future might go more his way than theirs.
John thought this as his body spoke to the audience in synch with the optical tape of the hydrogen demo. The words came out of his mouth without effort. Jism had helped him prepare the script and now he helped him present it. John heard himself talk of hydrogen and laser chemistry but his chip mind focused on something else.
Someone out there wanted to kill him. Someone wanted to shut down his brain and did not know that the Israelis had beaten them to it.
Watch that fat Texan sitting with the hat in his lap. Look at that grin in his jowls. I don’t trust him. Who wears a hat like that these days?
A grin is not evidence of malice. He has been grinning since you explained the origin of the term ‘porky ball.’ You might take it as a compliment.
Jism sat in a straight-back wooden chair as he spoke.
This Jism was the mature John Stuart Mill of his later years when he had held a seat in the British Parliament in the mid-1860s. He looked somewhat older than the windshield Jism but far more real. The wrinkles on his brow grew thinner as they ran up onto his bald crown crisscrossed with thin blue veins. Wavy hair circled his head and ran down his cheeks in thick sideburns.
John thought Jism should dress as a gentleman even if he often saw himself nude. So Jism wore a high white collar with a black silk scarf tied in a big knot at the neck. The scarf hung down onto his black frock coat. His blue eyes shined on either side of a long thin nose that John still thought belonged on a British sea captain. The thinness of Jism had always surprised him. He had the power to fill him out now but he would not do it. John wanted Jism to be his agent. But still he wanted Jism to be at least a partially free agent. After all, he had created it.
John had seen the thin black iron statue of John Stuart Mill in a small park on the Thames when he had gone to London. He had walked the Strand and tried to eat lunch in the old Waldorf Hotel but the hotel staff would not serve him in shorts and T-shirt. The British elites still believed in dress codes.
Then John had walked across the street down to the Thames and found the small park on his left. No one had cut the grass and weeds in some time. None of the tourists stopped by to walk inside the fence or sit on the benches or look at the monument stones. John had almost walked past it himself when he saw the black statue of the thin man standing right next to him. A small plaque on the statue said john stuart mill. John stayed there for an hour and used spit and green leaves to wipe some of the pigeon droppings off the statue.
John could not believe the odds of bumping into such a statue when he had come to London to search for Mill’s early articles in the Westminster Review. The guidebooks did not mention it. The closest thing he had found in them was mention of Mill’s mentor Jeremy Bentham. One guidebook said the old founder of the hedonistic calculus had had himself stuffed when he died in 1832. Bentham had helped found the Uni
versity College London and his will asked that that the UCL staff put his stuffed corpse in its lobby.
Later John had gone to UCL and looked at the old stuffed atheist who still sat in the case during business hours with a wax face and straw hat and cane. An old manuscript next to him said that society should seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. John thought Bentham and Mill deserved at least a cryonic suspension.
John could still see the thin black statue as he watched Jism smile now and sit in the chair and search the crowd for his would-be killer.
Jism. It sure is good to have you back. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should take that big jowly grin as a compliment. You know why? I don’t give a shit about anything right now. I’m just going through the motions. Listen to this stuff I’m telling them. I couldn’t care less.
Being rich means nothing to me now. It means something but I don’t know what. What can I buy out there in Atom World that I can’t get for free in here just by thinking about it? I don’t even have to store it or throw it away when I get tired of it. I can just will it away. Maybe all Atom World is good for is coming up with new things to think about.
I think this chip has sapped my will to live. Maybe that’s what the Israelis want. Maybe that’s how they think they can control me or make me a better chip killer for them.
Now understand. I don’t want some Sufi fuck to kill me. But I don’t not want it as badly as I should. Does that make sense? I don’t have the fear that I should have or the anger. And I don’t mean these synthetic fill-ins. I don’t even feel the race to make backups. How about that? You had a few mind crises before. How do you explain it?
Your new intellect demands new points of view. You will come to see that the views of your brain mind were merely provisional ones. They were part of just one of many possible psychic equilibria. They all involve more than rapid calculation. The cultivation of the feelings comes only after years of experience.