by Bart Kosko
John tried not to look at her. He also looked away from her small blue memory vortex on his mind surface. He did not want his memories of her to break his focus on Tabriz.
“I gave her life. She has found heaven in a chip.”
The Denise figure became fully real now and smiled.
“John,” she said in her sweetest voice. “What do you think?”
“Give me her files,” John said.
“I would be happy to but your chip won’t hold her complete file set. There is a better way. Join her. Join us. It is very simple. But first I would like to ask you something. I have been watching you for some time. Why did you step outside yourself? Why did you advance to an upload? To eat and rut like an animal? To act as a mere meat machine?”
“The Israelis made the ‘advance’ for me. I had no choice.”
“You have one.”
“You tell me. You murder and you manipulate and blow up things. Is that why you ‘stepped outside yourself’? To kill?”
“No.”
“Then why? You sure as hell aren’t proving neural theorems anymore.”
“In fact I have just proved some new theorems. Would you like to see them?”
“You know I do. But tell me why. What is this all about?”
“I am just a small empty mirror.”
“What does that mean?”
“I seek the light of heaven.”
Chapter 60
Riyadh
Saudi Arabia
“Commander Haddad! We are under attack!”
“Yes. Your excellency. You should go to the palace bomb shelter at once.”
“That is where I am. You prepared the strike plan I asked you to prepare?”
“Against the Israelis? Yes.”
“Good. Then use it!”
“Your excellency,” Haddad said. “The Israelis have not attacked us.”
“You will target them along with the Iranians and the Egyptians and the Sudanese.”
“Yes. Your excellency.”
The image of King Fahd and his watery eyes faded.
Haddad stood alone in the speaker booth. Then he turned to watch the map.
His staff plotted the progress of the F-16s and B-2 stealth bombers they had bought from the Americans. Their air-to-air missiles still failed to knock out a single swarm of the incoming cruise missiles.
Haddad thought he would feel fear but he felt only emptiness and fatigue. He had not slept for more than two hours straight since the Dhahran bombing. Too many men ran about and yelled now. There was no way to sleep in all this noise.
And the missiles were almost here.
He just hoped the Iranian cruise missiles did not carry nuclear warheads.
The manuals said his command bunker would likely survive a direct hit from a small nuclear bomb. He did not believe it. The Saudis had never set off a nuclear bomb and so no one had really tested the claim. And he had to assume that he sat at ground zero for at least one of the cruise missiles. The missiles were smart and would talk and scheme among themselves. They would share key aim points among their survivors.
Haddad walked over to Omar Salala at the control console.
Omar sat at the console and still wore his thin headset and mouthpiece. The dark young man had never seen a smart skirmish. He now watched the first swarm of Iranian cruise missiles approach Riyadh in clusters and then break up to seek their targets.
“Omar. The king has given the order to launch.”
“Against Iran?”
“That is correct. The full suite. Now.”
Omar stood and pulled the small chrome key from his chain. Haddad already had his key in his hand. They put the keys into the console and turned them 180 degrees. Omar sat back down and took off his headset.
Then he entered the launch codes into the console and confirmed them.
“We have launch,” Omar said.
“Now launch the Israeli suite.”
Omar did not pause to think. He entered the code and checked the screen and then confirmed the order.
“We have launch,” Omar said.
“Very good. We have done our duty. Instruct the field officers to fire at will. Full arsenal exchange. There is no point holding anything in reserve.”
Omar nodded and put his headset back on.
Haddad went back to his desk and sat down to watch the new blue and red launch screens. He could achieve nothing by pacing. There was no point thinking about who would die because of the launch orders he had just given.
Haddad opened the drawer and pulled out the green state-issued copy of the Koran.
He had studied the Koran since grade school. The Koran used to fill him with joy and fire and sometimes fear. It made him take long walks by himself through the dry streets of Riyadh. The book had helped him glimpse many such secret moments of truth.
Now Haddad saw the book only as a stream of symbols with no meaning. And he felt the emptiness again. He thought of Allah. He thought how his counterparts in Iran and Egypt and the Sudan would each ask Allah for their missiles to kill him. There were no more secret moments of truth.
Haddad dropped the book on his desk and stood up.
No one could bribe Allah with mere prayer. Prayers showed only one’s faith to Allah. Let the Shiites waste their time asking for divine favors. Such prayers were always nonsense and blasphemy and he should not think about it now. He should check on his men even though there was nothing he could do for them. They could only fire their SAMs and their decoys and wait out the attack.
A deep thunderclap shook the reinforced command bunker.
Haddad felt the deep flash of fear in his stomach. This was what he had waited for and trained for. He knew the answer even as he asked it.
“Omar! Was it nuclear? Surely it was not thermonuclear!”
Haddad saw Omar open his mouth to answer.
Haddad never saw the bright light from the next blast centered on the bunker. The fireball melted his brain before it could process what his eyes saw.
Chapter 61
The Hoover Dam
Boulder City
Nevada
“You murdering fuck. You’re looking for light while you kill innocent people. The Israelis told me you’ve been killing since you were 13. I hate to think how many others you’ve killed. And it’s your fault that I’m like this now. For what it’s worth I used to look up to you in graduate school.”
“You are angry,” Tabriz said.
Tabriz sat cross-legged in the air in front of John.
John swung with a right hand that appeared in his mind space and hit Tabriz in the jaw. The blow crushed his jaw and passed through to the other side of his face. Tabriz bled for a moment and then calmly looked up at John. His face had no mark on it.
Eytan and the others still stood frozen in their slow neural time. The image of Denise had vanished when Tabriz had sat down.
“Shit. This is no better than a cartoon.”
“John,” Tabriz said. “It’s your mind. You must choose how you wish to think.”
“Then why don’t you get out of it?”
“I will if you wish. I thought you wanted to talk. You are alone. I thought we could be friends.”
“I may not be as alone as you think.”
“John. Do you want me to leave?”
“I want to know why you kill.”
“You want to look in the mirror.”
“Why do you kill? You’re supposed to be a holy man. Did you bomb the Dhahran oil fields?”
“Yes.”
“You son of a bitch. How about the superacid meltdown of the Hombre and the Tamraz pipeline?”
“Yes. We did that and much more. Perhaps you wish to join us.”
“Jesus. I am not a murderer. And I sure as hell don’t kneel at the foot of some unobservable nothingness in the sky. Tell me. How can someone with your brains believe that crap? There is no evidence of your Allah or the Jews’ Yahweh or the Christians’ God. You proportion y
our belief to the evidence. And there is no fucking evidence for your belief! It’s thin air. And you fanatics not only believe in your gods. You kill for them. You kill for a belief based on a mistake! Do you hear me? Hasn’t anyone ever pointed this out to you?”
“John. What is the universe? Is it not evidence of something?”
“Double-talk.”
“John. Of what is the universe evidence? Look how much you have grown since we last met. You have powers of perception and cognition that are orders of magnitude greater than those you had in your brain. You have yet to explore most of them. I would think your chip would make you more humble and more open to other points of view. Is that not the spirit of science? So tell me the bounds of evidence. Where does it end? Who draws the line? Do you really know all that counts as evidence?
“Look around you at this hallway. Look at the minds trapped in their slow prisons of flesh. Already the chip has given you a new sense of time. Do we really understand time? Not at all. Even our subjective sense of time changes when we change the computational substrate of our mind. Our very conversation is evidence of that.
“Imagine how many new modes of thought and perception and even new modes of space and time we will come to know as we expand our minds to the next step and then to the next step beyond that. An ant can walk across the skin of an airplane. But can an ant mind grasp how an airplane works or judge how it flies or see the part it plays in an economy? Do you really think your mind has a better grasp of the universe than the ant has of the airplane?”
“Cut out the metaphor. All you religious frauds hide behind parables and stories. You’re always talking around this truth you claim to see. Well where is it? Shit. I used to watch televangelists for sport when I was in school. You know what you guys do? You evoke. That’s all you do. You don’t really explain anything. You don’t state something clearly and simply enough so someone can test it with data. You just say the right words and play the right music to evoke feelings. You do that to get people to confuse their feelings with thought.
“You’re a math guy. You know a logical result when you have one. So show me the big idea. Don’t dress it up in a bunch of poetic bullshit about ants and airplanes. Show me the result.”
“That is just what I hope to do. Clean the mirror. I want you to join us as we seek the light.”
“You’re stalling,” John said.
“Not at all. I want to help you see. You have already lost your fear of death. Haven’t you?”
“Tell me how you justify killing someone.”
“How do you justify raising a chicken or a cow and then killing it to eat it? There are ample sources of nonanimal protein.”
“I guess in the end it’s just a cultural legacy. A lot of people don’t kill them.”
“Not you. You have eaten the flesh of thousands of chickens and cows.”
“I was hungry. And they were dead anyway.”
“Would you have eaten them if they had IQs higher than yours?”
“Fuck you. I never killed a human being. Not even with my new chip IQ. You’ve killed them by the thousand. Tell me, goddamn it. How do you justify that?”
“They were going to die anyway.”
Chapter 62
Tel Aviv
Israel
“Colonel Hurwicz. WNN says the Syrians have launched at least 4,000 of their own cruise missiles against us. Why did I not hear that from you?”
“We just confirmed it ourselves.”
“Can we repel the missiles?” Sharon said.
“We can repel some of them.”
“Whose missiles will hit us first?”
“It looks like the Syrian and Iraqi missiles will land here first. It could be any minute.”
“I assume you have the retaliatory missiles under your command ready to launch.”
“Yes.”
“Then launch them.”
“Yes sir.”
“You know that the Iranians sent nuclear warheads to Riyadh and Dhahran?”
“I saw the satellite images.”
“I am directing you and the other commanders to target Gaza as well.”
“The Palestinians have not attacked us.”
“They are planning to overrun us after the bombing starts. The Egyptians have already massed ground troops.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“You will launch against Gaza or surrender your command.”
Colonel Hurwicz killed the transmission. Hurwicz hoped the Prime Minister had too much to do and too little time left to carry out his threat against him.
Hurwicz watched the swarms of cruise missiles on the screens. They seemed to come from all sides. They had an attrition rate of no more than one in ten. That was with the best Israeli SAMs firing against the first wave of the Iranian cruise missiles.
Soon the secret silos would open in the Judean Hills at Kefra Zekhariya and launch Israel’s nuclear response. The 300 Jericho nuclear ballistic missiles would end something that had begun before men wrote the Bible.
At least that was not his call.
Hurwicz opened a black briefcase and typed in a sequence of launch codes. He could not be sure that his tactical assets would launch but he had done all he could. He had the power to block a launch even though he could not launch on his own. Someone else would have to do that and it might well be Prime Minister Sharon. Sharon could launch missiles but he could not aim them so easily.
It then occurred to Hurwicz that Sharon might retarget one of the nuclear missiles at Gaza.
It was not likely but Sharon might try to persuade a launch commander when the damage reports came in. The old man had grown up in a West Bank settlement. He seemed to hate Palestinians above all other Muslims. The staff told stories about the nicknames Sharon had given the Palestinian Prime Minister and his cabinet. Maybe a Palestinian boy had called him a name once and now it had come to this.
Someone screamed in the hallway.
Hurwicz stood up to leave his small office but sat back down at his desk and poured more coffee from the small glass pot. Maybe Sharon would send someone to arrest him. He would know soon enough. There was nothing he could do now but watch the battle on the screens and wait for reports.
He did not want to call his wife or his son. The State would monitor his calls and he had to focus on his duty. Maybe his friend Eytan Baum would call. It was too late to take Eytan’s theory to Sharon but at least he would know what had happened.
The end of Israel was at hand and Hurwicz still did not know why it had come now. It had been just a matter of time until the Muslim extremists tried to swamp the tiny country with their stockpiles of cruise missiles. The Israelis had always kept the threat in check. All the dealing and spying and posturing and defending had seemed to have worked.
Now there was at least one cruise missile coming that had his building on its target list. It would hit the building or trade the target for another in a midair swap among chips in nose cones. Some surviving missile would win the target in a wireless auction. The question was whether that cruise missile would reach his building before Sharon’s military police did.
Hurwicz drank the warm coffee and watched a swarm of Israeli cruise missiles form over the Negev Desert and head toward Cairo.
He thought how the books might write about this day in a century. He thought how green he had found his first kibbutz farm when he had left Columbia with his degree in economics to come here. He was glad now for the first time that his son was in Berkeley and out of the army. Young Adam loved history and philosophy more than he loved the military and that was as it should be. Hurwicz loved them too.
Now the locusts would come and go in some form as they always had. Israel was always more an idea than a web of cities or a strip of land in the desert.
There might be two or three more Israels before the Information Age passed.
Chapter 63
The Hoover Dam
Boulder City
Nevada
“John. Have you seen what is in your secret files?”
“Have you?”
“Of course I have. I read them when we first started to speak.”
John sat with Tabriz now on a large black-and-white chessboard.
Red and gray clouds passed through the blue sky. Yet John could still see Eytan and Catton and the others frozen in neural time in the hallway. The one he could not see or sense was Jism. He had lost contact with Jism when Jism had advanced him to nanotime.
“I bet you did,” John said. “What’s in there?”
“Many things. Thousands of signal filters to censor what you can see and hear and think. An extra layer of dirt on your mirror. This dirt speck keeps you from using the same wireless frequency-hopping codes that the Israelis use.”
A hill of the secret red cubes appeared in the sky.
One of the cubes opened and out came a stream of black pseudorandom numbers and the equations. Israelis used these to compute the probability of a bit error in transmission.
“And there are hundreds of control algorithms. You can do things you don’t even know you can. You can break both encryption codes and human bones just like an Israeli commando. And of course some of the control schemes control you. The Israelis have bounded your freedom.”
Jism? Is that true? Where are you?
“Maybe better them than you,” John said.
“I have no desire to enslave you.”
“No. You just want to kill me.”
“Not at all. I want you to join us. We know your skills and your contributions. You are famous in the brotherhood. We have a nanoetemity to build a better world for man and for the mind he is destined to become. We want you to help us. And we can help you step outside this selfish shell you have grown since childhood.”
“Shit. This is not about finding the light. This is just about oil. Your Muslim ‘brothers’ can’t accept the fact that their luck has run out. Pretty soon there won’t be any more oil under the sand. There will just be sand. No more trillion-dollar subsidies from nature. No one will listen to you fanatics because you’ll have run out of gun money. The bottom line is that oil is finished. You know that’s true. The future is hydrogen and you can’t stop that no matter how many oil fields and desalination plants you blow up.”