Dark Matter (46 page)

"Look at that!" someone shouted from the table.

I whirled and looked where he was pointing.

On the screen used to display Trinity's messages, chaotic streams of characters flashed by almost too rapidly to be recognized. Numbers, letters, and mathematical symbols merged in a blinding river of confusion. The computer's circuits were clearly in disarray.

"What's happening?" asked McCaskell. "What does that mean?"

The symbols on the screen went multicolored as Japanese and Cyrillic characters began to appear.

"General!" cried a soldier at one of the consoles. "The signals from the pipeline running from Containment just dropped to zero. I think the computer's crashing!"

A whoop of triumph came from somewhere in the hangar. Then a new alarm sounded in the room, much louder than the others.

"What's that?" asked Senator Jackson. "What's going on? Is Godin dead?"

General Bauer walked to one of his computers, then turned to the senators with a nearly bloodless face.

"Sir, one of our surveillance satellites has detected fourteen heat blooms on Russian territory. The blooms are consistent with the launch of ballistic missiles." He looked back at the computer screen. "From the speed and heat signature of the rockets, NORAD computers have designated them as a combination of SS-18 and SS-20 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Those missiles carry heavy thermonuclear warheads."

Senator Jackson opened his mouth, but no words emerged. The brown eyes blinked in the bulldog face. "But you said that was impossible."

General Bauer didn't flinch. "It appears that I was wrong."

"Senators, we're approximately twenty-nine minutes from the first impacts,"

said General Bauer. "I ask for your approval to initiate the EMP strike as soon as the bomber is in position."

Senator Jackson looked uncertain. "What if that causes more launches?"

I glanced at the screen showing Trinity's output. The chaotic flow of numbers and characters showed no sign of abating.

"Highly unlikely, sir," said Bauer. "The computer appears to be crashing.

Fourteen missile impacts are survivable. And with the poor state of Russian maintenance, we might only suffer half that number of detonations. Even fewer on target. If we take out Trinity now, we'll survive this in relatively good shape."

"If the computer is crashing," said Jackson, "perhaps we should try to contact the president. He should make the final decision on this strike."

"NORAD shows seven more heat blooms!" cried a technician. "Bases are Aleysk, Pervomaysk, Kostroma, Derazhnya."

"Does that mean more missiles?" Jackson asked.

General Bauer waited for the panicked chatter of the other senators to subside. "We're now under threat of twenty-one missiles, Senators. Russia has over three thousand viable ICBMs. If we don't act now, we could be looking at numbers like that. The president empowered us to make these decisions. It's time to act."

Senator Jackson turned away from the camera and took a hurried vote by acclamation. "The EMP strike is authorized, General."

General Bauer nodded to his chief technician, who began transmitting coded orders to the B-52 code-named Arcangel.

"Where are these Russian missiles likely to land?" Senator Jackson asked.

"NORAD will compute that, but Washington is almost a guaranteed target.

They'll be coming on a polar flight path. You'll need to move to the bomb shelter beneath NSA headquarters very soon."

"We're already there."

"Good."

"But our families ..." Senator Jackson's face seemed to deflate, but then steel came into his eyes. "Should we send a car to the White House? Should the president consider a nuclear response against the Russians?"

"This isn't a Russian strike," said Ewan McCaskell. "It's a launch by Trinity.

It's the dead-hand system that General Bauer told us didn't exist."

"We don't know that," General Bauer insisted. "The Russians may be trying to destroy Trinity themselves. Trinity's incursions into their defense computers may have frightened them into thinking Trinity is planning its own pre-emptive strike against Russia. Remember, they perceive Trinity as an American computer. An American weapon."

McCaskell was shaking his head. "The Russians know our missiles aren't under computer control. And the president explained the situation to the Russian leadership before he went under surveillance. As did Trinity itself, with its message to world leaders."

"That was two hours ago," General Bauer reminded him. "Fear has its own reasons."

"Or none. We can't afford to act out of fear now."

"Or not to," Bauer retorted.

"General!" yelled a technician at one of the consoles. "NORAD shows one of the Russian missiles going down over the ice cap. Looks like a malfunction."

"Let's hope for more of those," said Jackson.

"The satellite has detected multiple high-energy flashes," the tech continued.

"That was a MIRV warhead, probably from a prematurely detonated SS-18.

Spectrum analysis is not yet completed, but yield estimates show ten warheads at five hundred and fifty kilotons each."

"In twenty-five minutes we'll have that happening over Manhattan," said General Bauer.

On the NORAD screen, a group of red arcs extended from Russian soil to the edge of the polar ice cap. The arcs continued slowly and steadily toward North America.

"Why did this happen?" asked Senator Jackson. "Because the computer is crashing? That's what caused the Russian launch?"

"No way to know," said General Bauer.

John Skow stood and spoke in a loud voice. "I think we should cut power to Trinity while it's in a chaotic state. We've seen its retaliatory response.

Let's not give it a chance to do more damage."

"General Bauer?" said Senator Jackson.

"I'm tempted, Senator, but I've been proved wrong once already. Trinity told us that it exported its retaliatory ability to other computers. So neutralizing the computer here doesn't solve our problems. If we cut power, we could be dealing with another twenty-nine hundred inbound missiles. I don't want to contemplate that."

"Point taken."

"Two more heat blooms!" cried the tech. "Bases are Nizhniy Tagil and Kantaly.

Those missiles will be SS-25s."

"Damn it!" roared Senator Jackson. "We've got to know what's causing these launches!"

"I can't answer that," said General Bauer.

I stood and walked toward the screen. "I can, Senator. Those missiles were launched because Peter Godin died."

Senator Jackson looked down at me. "Does the computer know Godin died?"

"Not consciously."

"What does that mean?"

I had never needed Andrew Fielding more than I did now. "Senator, in quantum physics, there's a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. That's where two different particles separated by distances of miles can behave in exactly the same way."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Bear with me. Two atomic particles are shot through different fiber-optic cables. Halfway along the cables, each meets a glass plate. There's a fifty-fifty chance that each particle will either bounce off the plate or pass through it. But when the particles are quantum entangled, they make the same decision one hundred percent of the time."

"What?"

"It's a fact, Senator. Einstein called it 'spooky action at a distance.'

Andrew Fielding believed that quantum processes like that play a role in human consciousness, and because of this—"

"Are you saying that Godin's mind and the computer model of his mind were somehow linked?"

"Yes. When Godin died, that link was broken, and it threw the computer into disarray."

"Are you suggesting that Trinity is dying, Doctor?"

"It's possible."

"No," said Ravi Nara. "Look at the screen."

The chaotic flow of numbers and letters had slowed considerably, as though someone screaming unintelligible words had begun to calm down.

"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 pseudo human 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.