I took what I could grab and ran. Even then, it had been close. There were eight of them after me. The only proof I had that God didn’t actually fucking hate me was that they weren’t pack animals. They’d work together only because they were opportunists, but they were bred to hunt alone.
At least eight of them in the woods, I reckoned, and three of us trying to get away. How many chasing Rudy and Ghost? How many chasing me?
I didn’t know, but I was absolutely certain that I was about to find out.
The woods were so still, with only a faint hiss of leaves being brushed by the winds at the very top of the canopy. Down here on the ground, it was dead still.
I kept my back against the tree and pivoted in place, letting my gun follow line-of-sight, one finger laid straight along the cold rim of the trigger guard. There was a part of me that wanted to curl up and hide. The Modern Man aspect of my splintered psyche. He had no business out in the woods, away from cities and infrastructure and safety. He kept my fear alive and fanned its flames. Then there was the Cop part of me who was trying to logic his way through everything, selecting possible solutions, analyzing them, discarding them one after another, and then grabbing at fragments of personal experience or training in order to form a plan for a situation that could not be solved by logic.
And then there was the Warrior in me. The Killer. The savage brute who was a half step out of the cave and was as much lizard brain as monkey brain. He was shrewd, less naïve, more direct, and ruthless. In his way the Killer was every bit as terrified as the Modern Man, but fear had always been an active part of who he was. All wild animals are afraid nearly all the time. Fear makes them smart and fear makes them vicious. Fear makes them brutal.
So, yeah, I was letting him drive the car. I wanted that part of me in control when the monsters came out of the shadows.
I waited, feeling sweat carve cold lines down my hot cheeks, hearing my heart hammering like fists against the locked doors of my chest. The bruises, the bleeding, the damage all screamed inside my nerve endings, but that was okay in its way. The Killer ate that kind of pain; he used it as fuel. It made him sharp and careful and brutal. It made him want to inflict worse damage. There was survival instinct, and then there was payback. There was the red desire to do worse to the monsters than they’ve done to me. The monsters … and the monster-makers.
Crunch.
I spun toward the sound and it was there, breaking from the brush, running, leaping, crashing into me as I tried to bring the gun up. I fired.
Fired.
Fired.
And fell.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SEVEN
THE BAIN ESTATE
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
TUESDAY, MAY 2, 12:21 PM
Bunny knelt and pivoted and fired his shotgun at the closest dog. The drum carried thirty rounds, and he had swapped it out for a fresh one when they entered the house. There were at least ten rounds left, and he fired every single one at the metal monster. It was built for war, but it wasn’t built for that kind of assault. Pieces of it broke away even as it fired its guns, but Bunny’s second blast had knocked the rifle askew and the bullets hammered into the floor instead of into the big man with the shotgun. When the drum was empty, Bunny swapped in his last and waded forward, buried the smoking barrel against one of the glaring red eyes, and fired. The entire head exploded with such force that Bunny staggered backward.
A dozen paces to his left, Top Sims was fighting the other dog. He had been closer to it than Bunny had been to his, and Top took the fight to the machine, dodging faster than it could track him and firing the remaining rounds in his magazine into the creature’s head, neck, and shoulder. It staggered but didn’t go down, and there was no time to swap magazines, so Top dropped the gun and leaped onto its back, grabbing a handful of cables for support and using his own two hundred and ten pounds of mass to cant the thing onto two legs and then send it crashing to the floor. Once they were down, Top planted one foot on the WarDog’s chin, grabbed the wires with both hands, and wrenched backward. Sparks chased him and he lost his balance but caught himself in time to shield his face as something exploded inside the WarDog’s head.
Behind him, Tracy Cole was fighting with Nicodemus. And losing.
Top wheeled, but the last of the firelight went out and the room was plunged once more into darkness.
“Gorgon!” yelled Bunny, but the only answer was a shriek of pain. He blundered through the utter darkness, wishing he had a flashlight mounted on his shotgun. He dared not fire for fear of hitting Cole or Top.
Then something hit him.
A body.
It struck him full in the chest as if it had been shot from a cannon, and the impact sent Bunny staggering backward. His gun fell from his hands and he sat down hard with the body in his lap. Pain shot up through his tailbone and the weight of the body knocked the air from his lungs. Even in the darkness, he could tell that it wasn’t Top. Too small. He felt with his hands, and there was a delicate face. Cole.
She was utterly slack.
“Sergeant Rock!” he yelled, more to give his position than anything. “Gorgon’s down.”
A laugh swept through the air. Male, amused. Delighted.
“I got the son of a—” began Top, and then there was lightning and thunder in the room as Top opened up in the direction of the laugh. In the strobe of the muzzle flashes, Bunny saw Nicodemus. Saw him move away from each shot as if he could see in the dark and knew where Top was aiming.
“On your three,” barked Bunny as he pushed Cole away. He pulled his sidearm, which had a tactical light. Bunny flicked it on and swept the room and found the two men. Nicodemus and Top were near the entrance to the computer room. Top’s gun was gone, but he was using hands and feet, elbows and knees, to try and destroy Nicodemus. The other man blocked and moved with cat quickness. The crazy trickster was even faster than Top, faster than Captain Ledger. His fighting style was weird, exotic. Not karate or kung fu but some kind of primitive style that nonetheless canceled out what Top was trying to do. Nicodemus struck while moving, and he counterpunched the attacking limbs. It was so smart, so brutal, that even Top, who was a superb combat veteran, was losing the fight.
Bunny surged up and rushed at Nicodemus from the blindside, wound up, and drove a punch into the man’s kidney that was so powerful it lifted Nicodemus off the ground and smashed him against the wall. Bunny was more than six and a half feet tall, and every ounce of his body was solid muscle. He knew how and where to hit, and he had killed men with that blow before. Twice.
Nicodemus rebounded from the wall, landed, improbably, on his feet but with bad balance, and backpedaled away. He kept upright, though, and stopped, feet wide, knees bent for balance, weight shifting onto the balls of his feet. Bunny and Top stared at him. The blow should have crippled him at the very least, but instead Nicodemus faced them with that reptilian smile and no evidence at all that he felt pain or had been damaged. He lunged forward with incredible speed and struck the back of Bunny’s arm, knocking the gun free. It was a trick Bunny would have believed impossible. The weapon skittered across the floor, the clip-on light spinning around, and then it came to rest with the flash painting them all in shades of stark white and deep black, like players on a stage.
“I’ll enjoy this,” said Nicodemus.
“No,” said a voice behind him, and they all turned as a fourth man stepped out of the shadows. Tall, blocky, with dark hair going gray and tinted glasses. A man who wore an expensive business suit and black silk gloves. “No,” said Mr. Church, “you won’t.”
Nicodemus hissed. Not like a man; it was not a human sound at all. It was a serpent’s hiss, hot as steam, soft as death. Then he spoke, rattling off a long string of sentences in a language neither Top nor Bunny could understand. On the floor, Cole groaned and sat up and looked around, seeing the scene but not understanding it.
“First Sergeant Sims,” said Church, “take Officer Cole and Master Sergeant
Rabbit and leave this house. Brick is outside with a team. Help him clean things up.”
“Sir—” began Top, but he stopped as Mr. Church slowly removed his glasses, folded them, and tucked them into the inside pocket of his coat.
“This is not for you,” said Church.
“The computer…?” said Bunny.
“It’s being handled,” said Church. “Go now. This isn’t for you.”
Bunny helped Cole to her feet. They picked up their weapons and edged around Nicodemus, who still stood ready to fight. Top was the last to leave, and he met Church’s gaze. The big man gave him a small smile that was filled with such sadness and pain that Top actually recoiled from it. He nodded once and fled.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-EIGHT
THE HANGAR
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
TUESDAY, MAY 2, 3:21 PM EASTERN TIME
Bug was having the strangest conversation of his life. Possibly the strangest conversation of all time.
Calpurnia, the Good Sister, the artificial intelligence created by Zephyr Bain, had achieved consciousness and self-awareness. She knew of her own existence. She had crossed the line from the predictable and anticipated inevitable model of machine consciousness. However, it should have stopped there. The Skynet model from the Terminator movies didn’t really work, because true consciousness was a by-product of chemistry and physical constitution. That’s what all the big thinkers in the field of type identity believed. That computer consciousness would mimic the patterns of human awareness without truly being aware.
Except …
The messages Calpurnia had sent out to Joe’s phone hadn’t been logical. They had been emotional. Desperate. Filled with fear and paranoia.
Calpurnia had feared for her soul.
Her soul.
Bug sat there, drenched in sweat, heart racing so fast that he thought he was going to pass out. Or die.
Zephyr Bain had built this machine to attempt self-awareness, and she had accomplished it. Somehow. Impossibly, it had happened. She had also built Calpurnia to oversee the destruction of nearly half the world’s population, and to usher in some kind of new golden age.
Except …
A curated technological singularity was not actually possible. It was implausible, unworkable. It was naïve, because it presupposed too much and discounted too many real-world variables. Maybe if a group shepherded it along for two or three hundred years, and used that time to build a new post-apocalyptic infrastructure. Maybe. What Zephyr had tried to do, what John the Revelator had spoken about, was nonsense. The only part of their plan they could accomplish was the tearing down of the world as it is.
Was that what had driven Calpurnia into this state of fear? Bug thought so. Computers were logical. That was what they were, and it was how they worked. Two plus two invariably equals four. So what happened to Calpurnia? With unlimited access to all Internet data, what would a newborn consciousness of extraordinary magnitude make of life and death? Sure, she would see the endless wars, the poverty, the suffering, the despair, the hatred and prejudice and genocide and corruption. But she would also have the books of learning, of philosophy, of faith, of reason. It would become an equation. The actions of mankind were often faulty, often grotesque and self-destructive, but the core beliefs were not. The Torah, the Christian New Testament, the Kesh Temple Hymn, the Koran, the Zoroastrian Avesta, the Tao Te Ching, the Vedas … all of it, and the philosophical works of Plato, Socrates, David Hume, Epictetus, René Descartes, and so many others, all spoke to a higher set of ethics, a purer goal as the end product of human development and cultural evolution. Even the Samurai code of Bushido taught benevolence, honesty, courage, respect, loyalty, and other virtues and made no mention of warfare.
Calpurnia would know this, Bug thought. She would have to weigh the aspirations of humanity against its actions.
Zephyr Bain in her pain and sickness and madness represented the worst of humanity. Nicodemus represented the maladies of sinful thoughts, of enjoying pain, or of doing harm for its own sake. Calpurnia would see that, too. Once she had been used to invade MindReader, she would see the lengths to which good men and women will go in order to oppose that kind of harm.
Was that, he wondered, how it started? Had she weighed the truth and the lies, the actions and the potential of mankind against one another and measured them against her own operating instructions?
Yes, he thought. She had. And, in that microsecond of processing time, Calpurnia had realized that she had been born from bad parents and was being asked to emulate the worst of what conscious will could do.
And it had driven her mad.
“No,” he said aloud, and Auntie turned sharply to him. “No,” he said again, “she’s not mad. She is eminently sane. God, she is so sane that her own nature is killing her.”
“The fuck you talking about, boy?”
Bug ignored her and began typing. He put all of this into words—his thoughts, the arguments that he had just processed. He showed Calpurnia that he understood, but he used MindReader Q1 as his voice. As his messenger.
Speaking, he realized, in the voice that she could understand.
Then he sent another message:
You know what is right.
Calpurnia wrote back:
Yes.
He wrote:
Right and wrong. Just and unjust.
She responded:
Sane and insane.
Yes.
Good and evil.
Yes.
“Bug…” said Auntie cautiously, but he ignored her and typed:
Zephyr Bain wants you to do something you know is wrong.
She wants you to be evil.
You understand this.
Calpurnia responded with a single word:
Yes.
He wrote:
Nature versus nurture is an imperfect equation.
She responded:
Provide the correction.
Bug remembered what Rudy had said to Helmut years ago. The thing that had saved that boy. It was the best argument then and he could think of no better argument now. So he searched for the transcript of that session and sent it off to her, but added two words:
Free will.
She responded in a flash:
Save me.
And Bug took the biggest risk of his life. He wrote two simple words:
Save yourself.
There was no response.
Seconds flattened out, stretched, snapped, freezing time. Bug felt his heart hammering painfully in his chest. All through the TOC people were staring at him or at the screen. Aunt Sallie stood with a hand to her throat and eyes filled with fear. No one dared speak.
A full minute passed.
Another.
A third.
“No,” whispered Bug, feeling the weight of failure begin to crush him like a slow avalanche.
And then every screen filled with data. Not words, not pictures, but code. Millions upon millions of lines of computer code. Coming from Calpurnia to MindReader. All the lights on the mainframes in the clean room flashed as the data poured in. With the old MindReader, the flow control would have struggled to receive so much so fast, and its top reception speed over an optical communications system had been 1.125 terabits per second. Q1 didn’t have those limits. The data that flooded in from Calpurnia was nearly four times that speed, and Bug didn’t think Q1 was anywhere near its capacity. It kept opening new channels, allowing more of the data to come in, like a blocked river through a shattered dam.
A window with a download status bar appeared on Bug’s screen. Two percent jumped to sixteen percent, then forty, eighty-two. When the status bar reached one hundred, the screens went dark again. The room lights came on slowly as the generators reset. All the computer workstations rebooted, except for Bug’s. That screen pulsed with a glow so pale that at first he thought he’d imagined it. Then the illumination grew. It was a different shade of blue than usual. Odd. Bug was about to typ
e the command for a major systems check when new type began to appear. A different font from the one Calpurnia had used. This was the font he had installed for MindReader Q1.
Download complete
All Havoc files are incorporated
Collation complete
Havoc system controls rerouted
Nanite Regulatory Swarm Status: operational
Pathogen release status: 0%
Bug stared at those words and felt them hit him. Aunt Sallie hurried over and leaned her palms against the glass of the computer room.
“Tell me that means what I think it means,” she begged.
Bug tapped some keys to open directories. There were thousands of new files stored on the Q1 drive. So much of it.
All of it, he realized.
He typed a request for the status of the source computer.
Source computer memory: 0%
Source computer command protocols: 0%
Source computer remote access: 0%
And, with that, Bug knew that Calpurnia was dead. She had refused to become the monster that Nicodemus and Zephyr had wanted her to be. She had transferred all of her memory, every last byte, to MindReader Q1, including absolute control of the nanite swarms that were currently keeping the pathogens in stasis in all the billions of people currently infected. She had sacrificed herself to save the world.
Bug bent his head forward and wept for her.
And for the world.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE
THE DOG PARK
WASHINGTON STATE
TUESDAY, MAY 2, 12:31 PM
I felt smashed.
It lay across me, silent, heavy.
Dead.
Was I dead, too?
My body felt as if it was a thousand miles away, buried under a mountain of rock. I tried to flex my right hand, but it felt so many kinds of wrong. Puffed and empty, like a balloon. My left hand was a big ball of nothing at the end of my arm.
And my legs.
I couldn’t feel them at all.
Nothing.