“So … you’re a socialist?”
“Did I imply that? No? How, then, do you infer it? I’m discussing curated evolution and citing examples of how that is done wrong. Communism isn’t a workable model. Neither, I might add, is the kind of extreme conservative thinking that works to establish a working class that approximates a new kind of slave labor while simultaneously making education harder to afford. That is such weak short-term thinking because it only provides for the group in power while they live but doesn’t provide for their offspring and future generations. It’s power used stupidly and without thought or caring about what’s coming next.”
The room was silent, and it was clear on the faces of many that they weren’t following the twists and turns of John the Revelator’s logic. A few were, and some even nodded. The young man in the UCLA hoodie merely looked uncertain.
“Tell me,” said John, “what is your opinion of Henry Ford?”
“He was a racist who hated Jews.”
“He was,” agreed John. “And what else?”
“He … um. Well, he perfected the assembly-line process. But that threw a lot of people out of work.”
“Did it? In old-fashioned car factories, sure, but didn’t it also create or help grow many other new industries. Because of Ford, car manufacturing flourished. So did tens of thousands of companies that became connected to car manufacturing. Oil production, gas stations, leather goods, metals mining and refining, plastics, glassware, the rubber industry, highway construction, commercial vending along driving routes, companies that make roadside signs and stoplights, car washes, parking lots, petrochemicals, auto-parts manufacturers and stores, auto mechanics, taxicabs, companies that make air fresheners, companies that make screws and nuts, and hundreds of thousands of businesses that depend on auto traffic bring them customers and … well, I could go on all day long. Sure, Henry Ford was an anti-Semitic ass. No one here will argue that. But look at the effect on us.”
The young man was shaking his head. “There are over five million traffic accidents per year in the United States, resulting in an average of thirty-two thousand deaths and over three million injuries. Cars release approximately three hundred and thirty million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, which is twenty percent of the world’s total. And they contribute seventy-two percent of the nitrogen oxides and fifty-two percent of reactive hydrocarbons.”
“Yes, they do,” said John, “and this is a problem. One I personally detest with the same ferocity with which I loathe anything that harms our biosphere. However, climate change aside, let’s consider the benefits to the population of ambulance services and firefighters and police who arrive in vehicles. People being able to commute to a better-paying job or take their kids to the right school or visit friends. The technological evolution from horse and buggy to motorized transport is a fact. Does it have a downside? Yes, of course, and some of those downsides are serious. But the benefits outweigh them. And isn’t technology being viewed as the solution to its own problem? The leaps forward in hybrid and electric cars, if managed correctly, will begin to reduce our carbon footprint. And e-commerce and telecommuting have already reduced the number of employees who need to drive to work and increased the number of customers who can shop at home. There are advances being made right now that will offer a better, safer, and more fulfilling life for humanity.”
He waved to the young man to sit and nodded to a middle-aged woman who had her hand up.
“You seem to be describing a pathway to Utopia,” she said. “But how can any advance in technology provide for everyone? Will seven or eight billion people have electric cars and nanomedicine sensors and autonomous home security? Most of the world’s population lives in poverty. Who will buy these things for them?”
John the Revelator looked at her for a long moment before he replied. “No one,” he said.
The woman said, “Then what will happen to them?”
“What happened to the saber-toothed cat, the dire wolf, the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, the passenger pigeon, Steller’s sea cow, the Pyrenean ibex, or the woolly mammoth?”
“They were hunted to extinction.”
“In some cases, yes. In others they became extinct because of loss of habitat and a scarcity of resources. The panda is slowly crawling toward extinction despite concerted efforts to prevent it. Other species have become critically endangered, like the Cross River gorilla, the leatherback turtle, the Yangtze finless porpoise, and many more.”
“But we’re talking about people,” insisted the woman, her outrage making her voice sound shrill.
“We are talking about how species become extinct or are forced to evolve in order to earn their survival,” John countered. “More than ninety-nine percent of the five billion species that ever lived on earth are estimated to be extinct. And humans can’t be blamed for more than a fraction of that. So far there have been five mass extinctions, four of which occurred in the last three hundred and fifty million years. The Permian-Triassic extinction wiped out ninety percent of all species on earth. And the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event sixty-five million years ago wiped out much of the life on earth and forced the surviving dinosaurs into the adaptive evolution that turned them into birds. The dinosaurs that evolved, by the way, were descendants of the theropods, the predators. None of the big, slow, stupid plant eaters made the evolutionary cut.”
“That’s a horrible example,” said the woman curtly.
“It’s unpleasant,” John conceded, “but facts do not need to be pleasant in order to be true.” He turned to the rest of the crowd, effectively shutting her down. “Natural evolution is not a pleasant process. Survival of the fittest goes hand in hand with extinction of the unfit. No animal species has a right to survive unless it has become appropriately adapted to ensure that survival. Exceptions only exist in situations of catastrophe, such as natural climate change, volcanism, earthquakes, and so on. Even in places where species have thrived in the absence of predators, it is generally because the predators were wiped out or displaced by geological catastrophes. The Galapagos Islands are examples. Or, more recently and less sensibly, when humans disrupt the evolutionary equation by hunting a species to extinction, deforestation, repurposing of habitats, pollution, and so on. That is not curated evolution; it’s mere bungling and shortsightedness.”
The eyes of the audience members were filled with reserve, antagonism, disagreement, but that was fine with John. His mission was to tell the truth, not to lead converts to a promised paradise.
“The technological evolutionary process works best when it’s curated. The automobile industry was a clear benefit to progress, health, and other kinds of industrial development. It also benefited organic needs by allowing for the transport of bulk food across great distances. Trains, too, of course, and modern shipping. But we’ve seen the greatest leap forward with computers. The microchip and the personal computer have changed the world and changed how we, as a species, move forward. We are now on the brink of the next major step in that evolution. The rise of robotics in everyday life will change our cultural landscape as surely and completely as the automobile did. Will it displace people? Yes. Of course. Will it disrupt lives and ruin fortunes for those who are displaced? Yes. Is that sad and tragic? Sure. Is it unfair?” he asked. “No. It’s evolution, and not once in the history of the world—not in natural selection and not in the rise of human dominance on this planet—has ‘fairness’ played a significant role in the process of evolution. Not everyone will survive, because not everyone is suited to the process of survival. In the past this process required biological luck, but in the coming change it is the willing, the active, the participatory who will earn their place in the world that will be.”
The room fell into a very tense silence.
“When the technological singularity comes,” said John the Revelator, “and it will come, then we have to curate it, manage it, but also allow it. Otherwise, we will not deserve to survive the
necessary extinction of the unworthy.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
INLET CRAB HOUSE
3572 HIGHWAY 17
MURRELLS INLET, SOUTH CAROLINA
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 9:06 PM EST
Bunny broke into a dead run even as his mind tried to process what he was seeing. It made no kind of sense. Everyone inside the restaurant seemed to be fighting. A full-out brawl. Even from halfway across the parking lot, Bunny could see bodies wrestling and swinging wild punches and hurling chairs. The big picture window near where Top had been sitting was splashed with an arc of blood. Bunny knew that pattern. It was an arterial spray; nothing else could paint that much of the window with such force.
This wasn’t a brawl. These people were killing one another.
“What’s going on?” yelled Cole, who was right on his heels.
“Call it in!” he bellowed as he ran. “Christ, call it in!”
He reached the door, whipped it open, and stepped into a red nightmare.
There was so much going on, and it was so fully involved, that it took even his combat-experienced mind a full two seconds to process it. It looked like a riot. No, it looked like a war, but it was hard to understand the sides. The waitress who’d waited on Top and him held a heavy metal paper-towel dispenser and was using it to smash the face of a fat man in a camo T-shirt. The fat man’s mouth was smeared with blood, and there was a horrible bite on the waitress’ thigh.
Nearby, a thirtysomething woman in a sundress and flip-flops was stabbing a fisherman in the throat. A tall man with a Latino face and Asian eyes knelt on the floor and tried to use his body as a shield as two fry cooks snapped at him with bloody teeth. A teenage boy picked up a chair and swung it at one of the cooks, missed, lost his balance, and fell, and the other cook pounced on him. Both cooks snarled like dogs.
Bunny couldn’t find Top right away, and then he saw a pile of wriggling bodies against the wall. A brown-skinned arm looped over the edge of an overturned table and punched one of the figures, knocking him back with a shattered jaw.
“Top!” bellowed Bunny, but yell was all he did. He stood in the doorway, feet braced, eyes wide, fists balled, and couldn’t move.
He absolutely could not make himself take one step farther into that madhouse.
The blood.
The innocent people being torn apart.
It froze him.
It robbed him of so much of what he was, and it flooded his mind with all the images from that carnage on the gas dock months ago. He was as much in that other moment as he was in this one, and equally helpless.
Behind him, Tracy Cole was yelling. Yelling.
Identifying herself as a police officer. Ordering people to stop, to back off, to stand down. Bunny heard her words, understood their meaning, and yet he could not act in support of them.
“No,” he said in a voice so soft and lost that even he couldn’t hear it. “No.”
The day began to cant sideways, losing its hold on meaning and reality, and then it started falling too fast to catch.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
OVER ALABAMA AIRSPACE
Halfway across the country, Rudy fell asleep and I didn’t wake him and even waved off the flight attendant when lunch arrived. This was the most comfortable Rudy and I had been together in ages, and closer to the old rhythm we had as colleagues and best friends. I liked it.
The fact that we’re friends is odd, or maybe it’s proof that opposites attract. In most ways we’re completely unalike. I’m bigger, gruffer, less friendly, and more apt to offend people. A former lady friend once told me that my face looks as if it’s been hit at least once from every conceivable direction and with great enthusiasm. She wasn’t wrong. She also suggested that I probably deserved most of that battering. We were breaking up at the time, so that was unkind, but it wasn’t inaccurate. I tend to offend oftener than most, and more deeply.
Rudy, however, does not. Even though we’re about the same age, he’s always the grown-up in the room. People like and relate to him. You can watch the Rudy magic at work and not really grasp how it’s done. He can walk into a conference, or go into a crime scene, or sit in an airport lounge and people gravitate to him as if he’s magnetic. That’s possibly a mixed metaphor, but you get the point. Once people make contact with him, they act as if they’ve known him forever. If I had to guess what his secret is, it might be that Rudy actually listens, and he genuinely cares about people and what they have to say. He cares about who they are and what their life experience has been. You can see it when he meets people. Rudy can make you feel, without artifice or trickery, that his day would have been an empty nothing if he hadn’t had the good fortune of encountering you. People tell him the damndest things. They tell him things they wouldn’t tell a priest, their best friend, or an enthusiastic torturer. Being confronted with that much unfiltered interest, insight, and goodwill flips the switches that allow you to release so much of the tension you carry around. It lubricates the joints of your emotional machinery. It’s a key element of his success as a therapist, particularly with people who have suffered great trauma. In another life, Rudy could have been one of the great con men of all time, or the founder of a new religion. But he’s too honest for either of those things. Rudy is Rudy, and he’s the best person I know.
While Rudy slept, I read Sean’s report and the other material Duffy had sent me. There was a lot of detail but not enough information, if that makes sense. Sean was a thorough cop, but he was out of his depth, and clearly Doc Jakobs hadn’t been able to reach any useful conclusions. I mean, to be fair, he’s a medical examiner and this was bizarro shit. Even for a conspiracy theorist like him.
I looked at the photo of Holly Sterman from her fake driver’s license. It was issued in the name of Kya Hope. Kind of a sad, ironic choice of a last name, and I was drunk enough to read too much into it and thereby depress the living hell out of myself. It showed a pretty girl who smiled into the camera, but the smile was as plastic as the card. There was a look in her eyes. Not haunted, exactly, and not lost. No, there was a kind of resigned wisdom in that look. An acceptance of her circumstances as all she deserved and all she could accept. It came close to breaking my heart. I understood why Sean had become so deeply involved in this. It was the girl every bit as much as the strangeness of how she died.
We began our descent into Atlanta, where we’d change planes.
Because of all our devices for instant communication and constant interaction, the world often feels very small. It’s not. This is a big old world, and it has so much room for strange things to grow. Cults and extremist movements. Hatred and intolerance. Political agendas and greed-based business models. War and pain. As we flew, my thoughts drifted from Sean’s case to a moody, morose speculation of what else was out there. I wondered, as I too often did these days, what else was happening right now, at that moment, at any moment. What missile was being prepped for firing, literally or figuratively? What bomb was primed to go off? What infernal device was set to unleash a new kind of hell? That kind of speculation seems absurd if you don’t do what I do. Those of us in counterterrorism and antiterrorism and special operations have to think like that, because, cynical as it sounds, there are people out there planning very bad things. Or engaged in very bad things. People like me and my colleagues in the various covert-ops world and intelligence networks have to imagine bad things so we can look for them. We have to adjust our expectations so that we don’t observe the machinations of the world through rose-colored glasses. We have to be ready at a moment’s notice to jump when our worst expectations are realized.
So, I asked myself, who was out there doing something so bad that it was the DMS that would be called in? What were they doing? And, the worst question of all, would we find out about it in time to stop it? Bad, bad thoughts to brood on while flying high above it all.
Corrupt people were doing dreadful things. People were dying. How much of that would ever be my problem? I wasn’t the worl
d’s best secret-agent man. I didn’t have some kind of no-borders global jurisdictional freedom of action. The DMS hadn’t been called for a lot of those cases. Right now, because of what happened last year, other teams were getting the jobs that should have come to the DMS. Jobs that should have come to me. My buddy Jack Walker and his SEAL Team 666 crew had been called in to handle a rogue genetics lab in Uganda. Sure, they kicked ass, took names, and rained down pure hell on the ass clowns who were trying to turn village kids into teenage supersoldiers, but that was supposed to be my gig. Did I feel put out?
No.
Maybe.
Not sure, actually. I felt closed out, which isn’t exactly the same thing. It was the same thing I felt when Tucker Wayne and his war dog, Kane, were dropped into the shit storm of a civil war in Trinidad. I felt it should have been me and Ghost. Jealous? That’s such an ugly word. Especially when it’s used with any kind of accuracy.
Church has tried to explain to me that I should be happy that there are other special-ops teams out there. Sigma Force, Chess Team, blah-blah-blah. I can’t expect to handle everything, and it’s unreasonable to want to be everywhere at once. And, let’s face it, some of those cases my friends have handled happened while I was otherwise engaged or laid up with stitches, drains, and splints.
Is it ego? I sipped my whiskey and thought about it. No, I decided. Not ego. Not exactly that.
It was fear.
After all the recent betrayals and shadow-government conspiracies we’d uncovered, I’d even begun to look at my friends and allies with a degree of suspicion. Justifiable or not. It’s hard enough when the bad guys are clever; it’s harder by an order of magnitude when you don’t know which of the good guys can be trusted.