Nanotime

by Bart Kosko

  “We don’t want to stop it. We want to finance it. The oil that has been our birthright is simply seed money. The price of oil will grow exponentially as the final supply runs out.”

  Supply and demand graphs appeared in the sky where the red blocks had sat.

  John looked at them and saw gray figures darting in flashes out the corner of his mind’s eye. Each pair of curves crossed in a large X.

  “The demand for oil will outlast the supply. So there will be one last great surge in oil profits before the world shifts to alternate fuels. It will amount to a great tsunami of capital. And I agree with you. The world will shift to hydrogen.”

  “That’s why you want to blow up your hydrogen competitors? To corner the market?”

  John felt dizzy and almost lost his train of thought.

  The gray figures darted about his mind at a greater rate. He tried to think of Jism but he could not call up the file prompt.

  “The shift to hydroenergy will not be a smooth one. We want to guide it.”

  “And keep it in Muslim hands,” John said.

  “Yes. Let me be clear on this point. Fire will cleanse this world before the smart water flows. All the large-scale simulations predict that. The issue is who will guide us through the chaos and take us more quickly to a better world. The oil-based world economy will literally burn itself out of existence.”

  “In other words it’s the end of the Roman Empire and you want to be the first fucking Pope.”

  “John. You have a fine mind. We have learned a great deal from your Black Sun laser chemistry. But you have no future with the Israelis. They plan to kill you before you leave here. And I can show you files of what we learned from this CIA killer Catton. He had orders to kill you rather than let the Israelis have you. You are not just a mind without a brain. You are a mind without a country.”

  John wanted to hit Tabriz again but knew it would do no good. Tabriz had mastered the way of the chip and found a way to get inside John’s chip.

  It was just a matter of time before Tabriz took it over.

  Jism? Where the fuck are you?

  “Let us be friends. You can join Denise and work with us on new molecular designs. I truly do not want to see your talent go to waste. But the dirt on your mirror is very thick. You are not at peace with yourself. You are drifting now. You were at your best when you applied your full talents to the pure problems of math and chemistry and neural learning.

  “Look at your life. That one period of mental focus has brought you where you are. And it was only a first effort. Why not have a million or a trillion more creative periods like it? That is how a mind at peace grows. You have so many more powers now and there are so many problems to solve.

  “Did you know that your ‘porky ball’ does not scale up? The molecule can turn unstable for complex laser stresses. Your friend Alon Gorenberg would have seen that in time. You need a higher-dimensional molecule for the true mass production of cheap hydrogen. But yours was a brilliant first guess. We have been working on thousands of new molecular designs.”

  “Jesus. You guys stole my algorithm?”

  “John. No one owns math. Didn’t you use some of my own work in your master’s thesis?”

  John started to answer but then saw a tiny man walking toward him in the sky. Tabriz looked at the man but did not move or change his expression.

  It was Jism and he looked straight back at Tabriz sitting on the chessboard.

  John cited your work twice. That is not the same thing as using your theorems in his algorithm.

  The tiny man had grown to a full-size John Stuart Mill with a red walking cane and a black silk top hat. Somehow John knew then that the darting gray figures had been Jism trying to catch up with them in nanotime. Jism had detected them and synchronized with them once he had sampled Tabriz’s remark about the master’s thesis.

  Jism. Where the hell have you been?

  “John. Please introduce your friend.”

  John. His discussion with you is a stalling ploy to seize control of your chip. He wants you to kill Eytan before he blows up the rest of us. He has just been searching your control dynamics. Right now he is making a copy of himself inside you.

  Now that is a true mind fuck. How can I stop it?

  Kill him first.

  Chapter 64

  Cyberspace

  The Wireless News Network had always had a bias in favor of U.S. events. Now it had a reason to focus more on events in the United States than the unfolding smart war in the Middle East.

  *

  WNN Channel 2: Interrupt for late-breaking news. Someone has bombed and toppled the United Nations building in New York City. Footage shows firemen fighting the last fires in the smoking and twisted ruins. The Red Cross has set up health-care tents for the hundreds of wounded and dying. The reporter confirms that La Guardia and JFK airports have shut down because of possible terrorist sabotage of their flight control systems. Many of the phone links from Boston south to Atlanta have misrouted calls at random. The Federal Reserve has asked all banks to suspend electronic banking. Sources suspect that hackers have set off logic bombs in the phone company software.…

  *

  WNN Channel 4: Leading Green U.S. Senators hold a press conference on the smart bombings in the Middle East. They demand that the United States protect Israel and airlift all survivors to NATO cities in Europe or to New York City. They ask the President to declare war against Israel’s neighbors if they continue to carpet bomb Israeli cities and settlements and send in ground troops. Footage shows hundreds of cruise missiles raining down on Tel Aviv like large shooting stars. The Senators claim that Prime Minister Sharon and members of his cabinet have landed safely on a U.S. cruiser in the Mediterranean. Sharon has set up an emergency government in exile. Egyptian and Syrian and Palestinian troops have overrun bombed-out Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.…

  *

  WNN Channel 7: Interrupt for late-breaking news. The Texas Highway Patrol reports oil wells burning in the central area of Ector and Crane counties and fires in at least one oil refinery in Corpus Christi. The Texas Highway Patrol also has reports of fires at oil fields in Carter and Love counties of south central Oklahoma. WNN footage shows hundreds of oil wells burning out of control after the last wave of Chinese cruise missiles have struck oil fields and refineries in Yakutia and nearby regions in Siberia. WNN has unconfirmed reports of new burning oil wells in Venezuela and in Mexico near the city of Tampico. The governor of Alaska has called out the National Guard to protect its oil wells and pipeline. The governor has asked President Jackson to put Air Force personnel in Anchorage under Alaskan authority.…

  *

  WNN Channel 28: A single Indian cruise missile has broken the Tarbela Dam in Pakistan. A flood of over 150 million cubic meters of water has fallen on hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis and their homes and farms. The government in Islamabad has declared war on India for what it claims was an unprovoked attack on the country’s key military and energy centers. The WNN reporter claims she has unconfirmed reports of dam bombings at the Rogun and Nurek dams in Tajikistan and the Guri hydroplant in Venezuela as well as other dams and hydroplants in Siberia. The confirmed death count from the flood at the Three Gorges Dam in China has now passed 1.2 million.…

  *

  WNN Channel 135: WNN special announcement. The previous “news” footage of Israel’s Prime Minister Sharon was not WNN footage. Terrorists may have morphed the sequence from earlier footage of the Prime Minister. WNN disavows all claims made in the broadcast about Israel’s plans to invade Jordan and Lebanon. WNN management has decided to suspend Channel 135 until further notice.…

  Chapter 65

  The Hoover Dam

  Boulder City

  Nevada

  Carsten Catton vibrated so fast he looked like a blur in neural time.

  Eytan and Daniel stopped walking and jumped back from Catton.

  John grabbed the black MRI gun from Catton and smashed open Catton’s h
ead with it. The vibrating man fell to the floor.

  John still had to grit his teeth through traces of the searing white snow. He had just watched hundreds of small Hamid Tabrizes in white robes screaming in a bonfire as he cut off their heads with a large curved sword.

  Jism. You have a violent sense of humor. How did you come up with this?

  The Sufis have often spoken of the sword of ecstasy. I thought the image sequence would help keep your mind off the barrage jam while I deprogram the logic bombs. Do not ease off yet. Tabriz may still come back the instant the jam stops. This time I will have lost the element of surprise.

  Eytan pulled the small battery pack from his coat pocket and checked it to confirm the barrage jam.

  “Grab him,” Eytan said.

  Daniel and special agent Rittenhouse kneeled down next to Catton. The vibrating man kicked Daniel off him and hit Rittenhouse with a back fist in the Adam’s apple.

  John let his mind speed up and he ran behind Catton.

  Tabriz had been right. John had motor skills and reflexes that he did not know he had. He felt his hands move through the cracked skull and deftly yank the gray superdense C-4 packing out from around the chip. He moved faster than Eytan and his security guards could follow. He knew by feel how to disconnect the trip wires and slide out the golden nanochip from its synthetic brain-stem chassis.

  Catton stopped vibrating and lay still with his eyes and mouth open.

  Rittenhouse rolled on the floor and held his crushed windpipe. John tossed the chip to Eytan.

  “Well done,” Eytan said. “Now it’s time to go.”

  “That’s it?” John said.

  “That’s it. The show’s over. And I mean it’s all over. For all of us.”

  Again John felt his instincts guiding him.

  He squatted next to the corpse and his right eye zoomed in on the palm-size PDA Eytan pulled from his coat. Eytan still held the jamming unit in his left hand.

  Jism. Get a wireless read on the PDA.

  It is as you suspect. Eytan has programmed the PDA to shut us down.

  The moment had come.

  John had just killed an officer of the U.S. government. They would shut him down for sure now. Eytan might very well end up carrying his chip on his key chain.

  If he lived at all someday, then it would be as a slave in a chip. They could let Denise meld with him if they wanted to but they never would.

  Now John could feel and see the first searing snows of Eytan’s barrage jam. Soon would come the empty hell of white space and then the darkness of shutdown. He almost lost his balance as he squatted.

  Jism. Nanotime. Quick!

  John watched Eytan’s fingers move slower and slower as he and Rittenhouse and the rest began to freeze in neural time.

  The purple vortex returned.

  John focused on the coconut-like husk of superdense C-4. It opened in his mind to form layers of schematic diagrams and knowledge webs of options and commands and instructions. He and Jism reprogrammed its blasting cap as the snow storm of Eytan’s barrage jam grew in strength and sound.

  Can we redirect the jam cone?

  Maybe. But we would have to do it right now. Are you sure you are ready?

  There were just two options. He could end it on his terms or let them end it on theirs. All his life he had let them call it. Now this one was his call. And what the hell. The Greens hated the dam and it was just another FDR state boondoggle anyway. Robots did most of the work at the dam. The few human workers left today should have enough time to get away.

  John used all his powers to fight the snow in his brain and to focus the barrage jam on the blasting cap.

  This was it. There was no pain or glory or sorrow. There was just a smoothly curved mind surface and the focused will it housed. John knew that the old gold miner in Searchlight would have done the same thing. The old miner would not have let someone take his mine. He would have cut the elevator cables and blasted the beams.

  The blast vaporized a small chunk in the upper section of the Hoover Dam.

  Soon the first cool blue waters of Lake Mead crashed through the dam. Tabriz had again picked a good blast point. Then the runaway torrent broke open the dam and flooded the steep red and brown desert gorges below.

  The lights and air conditioning of Las Vegas shut off and stayed off.

  Chapter 66

  Cyberspace

  The Wireless News Network had run without stop for decades. The growing supply of news had kept pace with the world’s growing demand for it. Now the supply had overwhelmed its hundreds of channels and even threatened the broadcast structure of the distributed network.

  *

  WNN Channel 2: Interrupt for late-breaking news. Mexican sources have confirmed that Zapatista terrorists from the southern state of Chiapas have seized cruise missiles from a remote arsenal in Heroica Caborca near the Arizona border. They have launched at least 60 missiles against unknown targets in San Diego and Los Angeles and Phoenix and El Paso. There are unconfirmed reports that a cruise missile has struck the Hoover Dam in southern Nevada.…

  *

  WNN Channel 5: Interrupt for late-breaking news. U.S. President Vance Jackson has asked Congress to formally declare war on Iran and Syria and Azerbaijan. He has meanwhile sent U.S. air and ground forces to airlift survivors from Israel and to repel the ground invasion of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. He has asked NATO to support Russia in its battles with the Islamic republics and China. President Jackson released only this message to the press: “The United States will not stand idly by as the world marches to World War III.” The WNN reporter has an unconfirmed report that miles of the Alaskan pipeline have melted in a superacid attack. The WNN affiliate in Phoenix claims that the U.S. Army has launched a cruise-missile counter-strike from the Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona against the rebel outpost in Heroica Caborca.…

  *

  WNN Channel 8: Interrupt for late-breaking news. China has declared a martial press blackout and has threatened Japan with a nuclear strike if it interferes in “Chinese interests” in Siberia. WNN sources claim China has launched two massive tactical cruise missile strikes against the Japanese. The first strike has already hit military bases in Okinawa and along the Siberian coast. The second strike is in flight against the Japanese fleet in the Tartar Straights near Sakhalin. WNN has unconfirmed reports that Chinese submarines have attacked and sunk a U.S. submarine in the Sea of Okhotsk.…

  *

  Then for the first time the Wireless News Network went off the air.

  Chapter 67

  Downriver from the Hoover Dam

  Near Boulder City

  Nevada

  The floodwaters of the Colorado River filled Lake Mohave to the south of Hoover Dam and spilled across the top of Davis Dam. These waters flooded Lake Havasu and the shoreline of Lake Havasu City and in turn pushed water over the top of Parker Dam.

  The Imperial and Laguna Dams held near Yuma. The Sea of Cortez saw only an increased but steady flow of water from the river over the next few days.

  A twisted mesquite shrub grew from the red canyon wall over a mile south of the Hoover Dam. The floodwaters had stripped some of its fine green leaves and broken and torn off some of the branches. The floodwaters had long since passed. The shrub had since sent up new leaves after the rare drenching.

  A black turkey vulture had landed on the mesquite shrub to tear at the tangle of objects on one of the broken branches.

  The objects did not give way to the bird’s hard beak no matter how hard it had pecked and scratched at them. Soon the faint smell of burnt flesh no longer attracted the great bird. So it had spread its white-tipped wings with black fingers of feathers on their ends and jumped into the canyon void to gain flight from a thermal updraft. The vulture went to look for other carrion that the floodwaters had left to rot on the canyon walls.

  The optical polymer cable still held the scorched golden nanochip to the burned artificial retina.

  The cable ha
d caught on the mesquite branch in the torrent. The chip and eye had wrapped around the branch and around each other many times in the strong turbulence of the unbound Colorado.

  John Grant had much of his vision back but no way to turn the eye from its fixed gaze on the sky. At least the eye had pointed up and not into the wall where it could have seen only the electromagnetic signals that bounced off the rocky cliffs. The eye could use the sun’s light for some of its own energy. That helped reduce the drain on the small crystal batteries at the base of the chip.

  The chip would still run long after John would have to shut off the eye. The odds were good that by then someone would find the chip-eye pair. John had already heard the radio bursts from the salvage crews that worked the canyon with metal detectors. They would come within days. That would give him thousands of years or more in the chip if he wanted to live at those speeds. It would give him plenty of time to lay plans and backup plans for his return to the world of atoms.

  The eye also let him watch and hear some of the broadcasts of the world. He had watched much of Europe sit out this world war in the Middle East and Pacific Rim. A reduced NATO had helped the Russians rout the Iranians from Azerbaijan. No NATO forces had attacked the Egyptians or Syrians or Palestinians. They now fought over the land that Israel had claimed for fourscore and two years.

  The countries of the former Yugoslavia had resumed their old border disputes as had countries from Namibia and Zaire to Chile and Peru. The Sunnis and Shiites had fought each other and fought among themselves from the Saudi peninsula to the borders of Afghanistan and India. Many of the broadcasts had come from Mexico as it fought dozens of internal revolts and found itself splitting into northern and southern states. Brazil had also split into northern and southern regions.