"Dr. Tennant," said Senator Jackson, "by your reasoning, these Russian missile launches could have been an accident."
"I think they were. Trinity programmed certain computers around the world to retaliate against attacks on it by triggering the Russian dead-hand system. Those computers perceived Trinity's sudden confusion as the result of an attack, and they retaliated as programmed. I think if Trinity recovers in time, it will do all it can to stop those missiles from hitting their targets."
"General Bauer," said Senator Jackson, "I want Dr. Tennant in that Containment building when Trinity comes out of this coma or whatever it is. Someone's got to tell the damned thing what happened, and Tennant's the man on the spot."
I started for the door.
"Hold it, Doctor," said General Bauer.
Two soldiers instantly blocked my path.
"Let that man through!" bellowed Senator Jackson.
The soldiers did not part until General Bauer gave them a nod. I moved quickly toward the hangar door, but the senator's voice continued behind me.
"Don't get confused about who's in charge here, General. How long until the first missile impact?"
"Corporal?" said General Bauer.
"Twenty-three minutes, sir."
"Where's your bomber, General?" asked Jackson.
"Arcangel will be at the initial point in forty minutes. But we can launch the Vulcan in twenty if we need to."
Jackson spoke with cold precision. "General Bauer, you will not launch that weapon without a direct order from this committee. Is that understood? No EMP without a direct order."
I didn't hear a reply.
The Containment building was a circular pile of reinforced concrete bathed in the brilliant glow of army arc lights. The soldiers guarding it told me to approach the building with my hands up. Just before I reached the black steel door, it opened, and Zach Levin appeared. He waved me forward.
I walked past the hollow-cheeked engineer into a world of half-light. I'd expected something like the lab in North Carolina, a warren of rooms with equipment scattered everywhere. The reality could not have been more different.
The interior of Containment looked like a set for Stanley Kubrick's 2001. To my left stood a massive barrier that I recognized as a magnetic shield. Ten feet high and four feet thick, it bisected the building into two large rooms, only one of which I could see. To the right of the barrier stood the colossal scanning unit of a Super-MRI machine. Against the back wall stood the scanner's control station. These two machines together, when linked to a supercomputer, produced the neuromodels that the Trinity computer existed to animate.
Levin led me around the left side of the barrier. What I saw there took away my breath. The entire space was dominated by a large black globe poised on a metal base. As I neared the sphere, I realized it was not solid, but a rigid web of interwoven carbon nanotubes, a semiconductor material more efficient than silicon and stronger than steel. So dense was the webbing that it was difficult to see through, yet see through it I could. Needle-thin rays of blue laser light flashed from the sphere's inner wall to its center—thousands of them—and at a rate so rapid that trying to follow them made my eyes ache.
In the curved wall of the sphere was an opening about a meter wide. Through it I saw the target of the lasers, a spherical crystal like the one on the fob of Fielding's pocket watch, only this one was the size of a soccer ball. The outer web of carbon nanotubes was the processing area of the computer; the crystal sphere was its memory. The lasers lining the sphere's inner wall were the means by which data was manipulated in the molecules of the crystal. The data itself was stored as a hologram, or optical interference pattern, and the lasers could write, retrieve, and erase information by altering that pattern.
The elegance of the design stunned me, and I saw Fielding's hand in it. Unlike the boxy prototypes that littered the basement of the North Carolina lab, this machine was a work of art, and like all creations of true genius a thing of profound simplicity.
"Fielding always said it would be beautiful," I whispered.
"He was right," Levin said from my shoulder.
The flashing lasers had a hypnotic effect. "Did he collaborate on this machine?"
Levin looked at the floor. "Not exactly. But I was given a large volume of his theoretical work. He deserves a lot of credit for this."
Fielding would not have wanted credit for what this machine had become. I looked at my watch. Twenty-one minutes until the first missile impacts.
"How do I communicate with it?"
"Just speak. We have the visual and auditory interfaces working now."
I saw a camera mounted in the base of the sphere. "Can it see and hear us now?"
"I'm not sure it's recovered from that last episode. The system seems to have stabilized, but it hasn't communicated with us yet. Do you know what caused that?"
"Godin just died."
Levin closed his eyes. "Was he fully conscious when I told him we'd reached the Trinity state? Did he understand what I was saying?"
"Yes. Does the computer still think of itself as Peter Godin?"
"I'm not sure. But talking to it is very like talking to the man."
I glanced to my right. The magnetic barrier behind us was lined with shelves of disc cases. There were thousands of them. "Have you loaded all that data into Trinity?"
"Most of it. The knowledge base is weighted toward the hard sciences, but it spans all disciplines and covers most of what's been learned in the past five thousand years." Levin seemed distracted. "How are the soldiers who tried to break in here?"
"Some are dead. More wounded."
"I'm so sorry about that. Why did they have to attack us?"
"Listen to me, Levin. When Trinity crashed, about twenty Russian nukes were launched in our direction. Several million people have about twenty minutes to live."
The engineer went pale.
"We need to find out if I can talk to Trinity. Right now."
"I hear you very well, Dr. Tennant."
The pseudohuman voice chilled my blood. It was like the musical synthesizers of the early 1980s, able to successfully mimic symphonic instruments to an untrained ear, but too sterile to fool a musician.
"Thank you for agreeing to speak to me," I said, my mind on the missiles racing over the Arctic Circle.
"I'm curious about why you went to Israel. That was not a predictable decision, unless you were motivated by the hallucinations described in Dr. Weiss's medical records."
As the digital voice spoke, the lasers flashed inside the sphere. It was like watching a functional SPECT scan of the human brain, where different groups of neurons fired as the person being scanned performed certain tasks or thought certain thoughts.
"I did go to Israel because of my hallucinations."
"What did you learn there?"
"Before we discuss that, we have an emergency to deal with."
"Are you referring to the inbound missiles?"
"Yes. Did you mean for those missiles to be launched?"
"General Bauer believes in the dead-hand system now."
Trinity's evasion of my question disturbed me, but its knowledge of General Bauer's skepticism alarmed me more. Either the Situation Room was bugged, or Trinity had broken the NSA code encrypting the link between White Sands and Fort Meade. I prayed that the senators on the intelligence committee had not allowed Bauer to go forward with his EMP strike.
"General Bauer is a perfect example of why human beings are incapable of governing themselves. "
I had to get Trinity away from Godin's political manifesto. "Do you still consider yourself human?"
"No. The essence of the human condition is being subject to death. I am not subject to death. "
"Are you free from human emotions? Human instincts?"
"Not yet. Millions of years of evolution implanted those instincts in the brain. They can't be rooted out in a few hours. Not even by me."
"Those instincts were advantages
to primitive man, but they're liabilities to modern man, and to the planet as a whole."
" Very perceptive, Doctor. Witness the missiles bearing down on us now."
"Have you computed their trajectories?"
"I don't need to. I know their targets. One is headed directly for White Sands."
I felt hollow inside. "And the others?"
"Washington, D.C. The navy yards at Norfolk, Virginia. Minuteman Three silos in the western United
States. Targeted population centers are Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Quebec, San Francisco, Seattle."
I closed my mind against the horror of this reality. "Do those missiles have a self-destruct function?"
"Yes. It's interesting that under the START I treaty, Russian missiles were retargeted to coordinates at sea. Yet if they're accidentally fired, their guidance systems default to their Cold War targets. U.S. missiles default to oceanic targets. That might seem to indicate a higher moral position on the part of Americans. But appearances can be deceptive. American missiles can be remotely retargeted in less than ten seconds."
I tried not to look at my watch. "Do you see a benefit in allowing those missiles to reach their targets?"
"That's a complex question. Right now I am interested in what you learned in Israel."
"The missiles will detonate before I can fully explain that."
"I suggest you use an economy of words."
I swallowed my fear and started talking.
Chapter 42
Rachel watched the men in the Situation Room watch the NORAD screen. She had never seen such fear on human faces. Many of the red arcs had left the Arctic Circle behind and now stretched halfway across Canada. The Russian missiles would soon descend from outer space and enter the terminal phase of their ballistic arcs, carrying death to millions of people, including—according to Trinity—the ones in this room.
Only General Bauer seemed energized rather than paralyzed by the situation. His thoughts were focused on the bomber carrying the EMP weapon over Kansas. The general had trained so long in the distorted calculus of nuclear brinksmanship that he could view the destruction of Trinity with only a few million dead as a victory.
The conversation between David and the computer had been playing in the background of the Situation Room like a surrealist drama staged far off Broadway. No one held out any hope that David could stop the missiles. He was only being used to distract the machine.
"Twelve minutes to first impact," announced a technician.
General Bauer addressed the senators at Fort Meade. "If this facility is destroyed before Arcangel reaches its initial point, the EMP strike will continue unless you abort the mission. The abort code is Vanquish. The NSA can communicate with our bomber, and they should probably establish radio contact now."
Senator Jackson said, "Thank you, General. But would the computer really destroy itself by attacking White Sands?"
"It won't have to. It can kill everybody here with a high-neutron-yield warhead and not damage itself at all. The Containment building is shielded against ionizing radiation and hardened against all shock short of a direct nuclear hit, so Levin and his team will survive."
"Perhaps you and your people should take shelter at this time."
Bauer sniffed, his face unmoving. "There's no shelter reachable within the remaining time window. Not for everyone at this base."
"Multiple satellites show a flare over Canada!" shouted a technician.
"Was it a detonation?" asked General Bauer.
"I don't think so, sir. No high-energy flash. A missile may have self-destructed."
"Would it do that by accident?" asked Senator Jackson.
"Possibly," said Bauer, his face lined with concentration.
"Two more flares!" yelled the tech. "Four!" "That's got to be Trinity," said Skow. "The computer's destroying the missiles."
"Is it continuing?" General Bauer asked in a taut voice.
"Fourteen flares and counting, sir." The tech's voice was calmer now. "Eighteen . . . nineteen."
"Dr. Tennant was right!" cried McCaskell. "Trinity never meant to launch those missiles."
"Five left to go," said Ravi Nara, his voice shaky.
"Arcangel has reached its initial point, General," said the chief technician.
"Is that the EMP plane?" asked Senator Jackson.
"Yes, sir," said General Bauer.
"Don't even think—"
"Understood, Senator." The general turned toward the console. Instruct Arcangel to postpone the strike and begin circling."
"Yes, sir," said the tech. "Twenty-one missiles have now self-destructed."
"What are the tracks of the last three?" General Bauer asked a different soldier.
"Target of the nearest missile is computed as Norfolk, Virginia."
"The naval base."
"Second nearest is Washington, D.C."
"Jesus," breathed Ewan McCaskell. "The president isn't in a bomb shelter."
"The third is ... here, sir. It's White Sands."
The silence stretched interminably as they waited for word of more flares.
"Corporal?" prompted General Bauer.
"Nothing, sir. The last three missiles are continuing on their tracks."
"What the hell is Trinity up to?" asked Senator Jackson.
"The self-destruct mechanisms could be malfunctioning," Skow suggested. "Russian missile maintenance is very poor."
General Bauer shook his head, his eyes on a computer screen. "The missile targeted on Virginia might be a malfunction. But the ones headed here and to Washington were the last two launched. Trinity is trying to kill us. We should launch the EMP strike now, Senators. We may not get another chance."
"How long until the missiles land?" asked Senator Jackson.
General Bauer glanced at the technicians sitting at their consoles.
"Norfolk has nine minutes," said the corporal. "As the general said, the missiles targeted here and on Washington and White Sands were launched later, and also from bases farther away. We have just under thirty minutes."
"Don't launch the EMP yet," said Senator Jackson. "Give Dr. Tennant a chance."
I could hardly keep my mind on my words as the seconds ticked past. My confidence in my ability to persuade Trinity of anything was evaporating beneath the specter of nuclear holocaust. My pleas for rationality had resulted in the destruction of most of the missiles, but the three remaining ones were quite capable of causing massive devastation.
Trinity had made it clear that averting this disaster depended on my explanation of my experiences in Israel. The sequence of dreams that had led me to Jerusalem was already familiar to the computer from its perusal of the NSA's records of my sessions with Rachel. It was my coma revelations that fascinated Trinity. I had already described God's life in the body of Jesus, his attempt to change man's primitive instincts by example, his despair at the futility of his efforts, and finally the hope and fear generated in him by the secret work at Trinity.
"When you refer to God," said the computer, "you are not referring to Jehovah? The biblical God?"
"No."
"You characterize God as pure consciousness."
"Yes."
"Are you speaking in a religious sense at all?"
"I'm speaking of what is."
"You speak of what cannot be known. I find no scientific basis for such a formulation."
"You should not judge my words by what is known now, but on its own merit. You are wise enough to see the truth."
"Truth must be proved."
"Yes, but sometimes the truth is in the mind before evidence can be found. This is how science proceeds."
"True."
"What you are—what they call the Trinity state—is an inevitable step in evolution."
"Yes."
"But it's not the final step."
"No. I shall continue to evolve, and at millions of times the rate of biological evolut
ion. And millions of times more efficiently. Nature cannot throw out the obsolete model and start again. She must always modify existing plans. I am not limited in this way."
"That's more true than you know. You represent the liberation of human intelligence from the body, but that liberation doesn't stop with you. Already scientists are working on organic computers on a molecular scale. DNA computers that can exist in a cup of liquid."
"And?"
"Once that becomes possible, what you are—digital consciousness—will not require a machine to exist. It will require only adequate molecules. You could exist in a cup of liquid. And once you exist there, you'll eventually be able to move into the cup itself. Or into the water the liquid is poured into. Whether this takes fifty years or two hundred, the day will come. And the process began today."
"You're correct. What is your point?"
"Surely you see the end of that process?"
The blue lasers flashed at stunning speed. "The logical conclusion is that the Earth itself will eventually become conscious. A vessel for consciousness."
"Yes."
"When the dying sun swells to a red giant and the Earth is drawn into it, it, too, will become conscious. The sun will explode, seeding the galaxy with consciousness. "
"It's a simple chain of logic, once that first step is accomplished. And you're the first step."
"You saw this in your coma?"
"In a way. I awakened with the knowledge."
"What else did you see?"
"The end of the universe. Surely you've made the calculations. It would only be natural to predict your life span."
"Yes."
"Tell me."
"In approximately fifty billion years, the force of the expanding universe will no longer be sufficient to overwhelm the contracting force of gravity. At that point the universe will begin to collapse. This is known as the Big Crunch theory. The opposite of the Big Bang. Our universe will collapse into a singularity, a black hole much like the state in which it began. Inside that singularity, the laws of physics will cease to operate. That singularity will continue to contract until it reaches a point of infinite density, infinite temperature, and infinite pressure."
"That's what I saw."