Six (6 page)

Corporal Williams shuts off our car's engine and looks at me for the first time. “Your wheelchair's in the back?”

I nod. Then I point at the building's doorway. The door is all the way up, but I can't see anything inside. It's too dark. “Is that the Nanotechnology Institute?”

“That's one name for it. We usually call it Pioneer Base.”

“But it's so small.”

Williams chuckles. “You're looking at the entrance, the top of the elevator shaft. The base is underground.”

My mouth goes dry. This is worse than the ravine. “How far down?”

“You'll see.”

I'm in the front row of an auditorium deep inside Pioneer Base. I kept my eyes closed during the descent in the elevator, so I don't know how far underground I am. To stop myself from thinking about the tons of dirt and rock above me, I concentrate on the thirty people in the room. Including myself, there are twelve teenagers and eighteen parents sitting in the auditorium's curved rows. We're all facing an empty podium on an oval stage.

Fortunately, the rows are widely spaced, leaving enough room for wheelchairs. Of the twelve teenagers, six are partially or fully paralyzed. Three of them are worse off than I am—they can't move at all, neither their arms nor their legs, and they're breathing through tubes connected to mechanical ventilators. All three are boys. One is white, one is black, and one is Asian. Although they seem to have the same kind of muscular dystrophy I have—Duchenne is the most common type—they're obviously in a more advanced stage of the disease. It's sobering to see them strapped in their chairs, helpless and silent. As I stare at them I realize I'm looking at my own future. Unless the U.S. Army has a miracle in store, I'll fall silent too.

The other six kids can still walk, although most of them are a little unsteady on their feet. Shannon Gibbs waves at me as her mother and father guide her to a seat in the second row. Her parents are short and plump, and they look anxious. Just behind them, in the third row, is another girl with cancer. Painfully thin, she wears a cashmere sweater and a frilly blue hat to hide her baldness. The girl's parents, dressed in business suits, seem to be wealthier than Shannon's but just as anxious. They're all hoping the Army has some experimental drug that'll cure their kids, but the secrecy is driving them crazy. They're wondering why they had to go all the way to the Rocky Mountains just to hear about it.

Two rows farther back, a haggard mother sits next to a boy whose head is unnaturally large and deformed. His lower jaw is massive, as big as a shovel blade, and fist-size tumors bulge out of his forehead like horns. This isn't an ordinary case of brain cancer—this is something unusual, freakishly rare. The sight of him is disturbing, and a little disorienting too. I'm usually the guy who makes everyone else in the room uncomfortable, but now I'm the one who's squirming.

In the very last row, sitting alone, is a tall, striking girl with a Mohawk. Both sides of her head are shaved, but running down the middle of her scalp is a narrow strip of hair, dyed green and bunched in glue-stiffened spikes. Her eyebrows and lips and nostrils are pierced, and a tattoo of a snake loops above her left ear. Aside from her slenderness, she doesn't look ill. She looks a bit like Brittany, but her skin is light brown, the color of chocolate milk. I'm staring at her, trying to figure out if she's black or Hispanic or Asian, when she snaps her head around and glares at me. Her face is beautiful and terrifying.

I quickly turn away. At the same time, the kid with the deformed skull lets out a snort. He swings his massive head back and forth, glancing first at me and then at the girl with the Mohawk. He must've seen me staring at her. After a few seconds he gives me a gap-toothed grin. I have no idea what to make of it. Does he think this is funny?

Uncomfortable again, I look around the auditorium, wondering where my father is. I haven't seen Dad since the soldiers took him away, and I'm starting to worry that he's in trouble. Then I hear the whir of an electric motor. A large video screen descends from the ceiling above the stage. A moment later, General Hawke steps up to the podium.

Up close he looks even bigger than he did at the checkpoint. He's a giant in winter camouflage, from the white hair on top of his block-like head to his tree-trunk legs and mud-spattered boots. His face is square and ruddy, and his eyes are a cold, bright blue. He rests his huge arms on the podium and leans toward the microphone.

“Welcome to Pioneer Base.” His voice, unsurprisingly, is very deep. “Before we start, I want to remind you of the nondisclosure agreements you've all signed. The information I'm going to discuss in this briefing is classified. If you talk about it with anyone outside this room, the government will prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law. In other words, they'll toss you in jail and throw away the key.”

He stares at us for a moment, frowning. Then he presses a button on the podium, and a black-and-white image appears on the screen behind him. It's a satellite photo. It shows a cluster of large rectangular buildings and a pair of dark circles etched into the ground nearby.

“This is Tatishchevo Missile Base,” General Hawke says. “It's a Russian armed forces installation, five hundred miles southeast of Moscow. But the Russian army isn't running the place anymore. It's under the control of an AI, an artificial-intelligence system.”

He pauses, surveying his audience. Strangely, no one shows much of a reaction. They're probably too confused to respond. The only one who's frightened is me. Thanks to Dad, I know enough to be scared out of my mind.

Hawke grasps a long wooden pointer that's leaning against the podium. “This AI, code-named Sigma, was developed in the United States, at a lab in Yorktown Heights, New York. But the Russians also had a computer lab for developing artificial-intelligence systems, and it was located right here.”

He steps toward the screen and taps his pointer on one of the rectangular buildings in the photo. “The Russian army put the lab at Tatishchevo because it didn't trust its own soldiers. Their generals were worried that some renegade troops might try to take over the missile base. So they built a whole regiment of automated tanks, more than a hundred of them, all designed to be operated by an AI that would send instructions to the tanks by radio. They thought an AI would be more trustworthy than a human commander.” He shakes his head. “If you ask me, it was a pretty stupid idea. But as the saying goes, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. We did some stupid things too.”

He turns to his left as he says this, glancing at a doorway beside the stage. Several soldiers stand by the doorway, watching the briefing from the sidelines. One of them is Colonel Peterson, who grimaces as Hawke mentions the bit about glass houses. I remember what Dad said in the SUV: Peterson wouldn't let him erase the AI.

Hawke turns back to the screen. “Sigma escaped from the research lab in New York by transmitting its software code over the Internet. Then the AI broke into the Russian military's network and loaded its program into the powerful neuromorphic computers at the Tatishchevo lab.” He taps his pointer on the rectangular building again. “The first thing the program did was delete all the Russian-made AI systems, which weren't quite as advanced as Sigma. Then it took control of the automated tanks and massacred the base's soldiers in their barracks.”

The small crowd in the auditorium starts to murmur. A few of the parents and teenagers have realized that something is wrong, something besides their own personal tragedies. Hawke waits for them to quiet down, then aims his pointer at the edge of the satellite photo.

“After killing the soldiers, Sigma moved the unmanned tanks to defensive positions along the base's perimeter. The AI also took control of Tatishchevo's radar systems. This radar will alert Sigma if there's an attempt to bomb the base or launch cruise missiles against it. And the AI has warned us that it'll retaliate if we attack it.” He points at one of the dark circles in the photo. “This is a silo for an SS-27 missile. The SS-27 has a range of almost seven thousand miles and carries a nuclear warhead that can destroy a whole city. There are fifty more silos spread across the base. Sigma has threatened to launch all the missiles if anyone tries to attack Tatishchevo.”

The murmuring spreads across the room. Several people raise their voices. Shannon starts to cry and her father hugs her. The deformed boy turns to his mother, who lets out a curse. I'd like to curse too, but it's a struggle just to breathe. I need to find Dad. I need him badly.

General Hawke holds his hands out, appealing for calm. “Okay, settle down. Now you can see why the information is classified. We're working with the Russians to keep this thing quiet.”

The girl with the frilly hat buries her face in her hands. Her father, the rich guy in the business suit, stands up and points a finger at Hawke. “What's going on, General? We came here because you promised a medical treatment for our children. Why are you telling us this…this wild story? Is this your idea of a joke?”

Hawke stares at the girl's dad, fierce and hard. “It's not a joke. Back in 2012, the Department of Defense analyzed the risks of developing AI systems, so we knew this kind of catastrophe might happen someday. But we couldn't simply halt our AI research. Other countries were designing their own AIs, and they weren't going to stop. So about a year ago we started working on a defensive strategy. A countermeasure. That's why we built this base. And that's why you're here.”

The general turns his head, scanning all the faces in the auditorium. Then he glances again at the doorway beside the stage. “Now one of my colleagues will explain the technology behind the Pioneer Project. This is Tom Armstrong, the project's chief scientist.”

Dad appears in the doorway and walks across the stage. I'm relieved to see him but also a little unnerved by the change in his appearance. He's no longer wearing the polo shirt and khaki pants he wore during the drive in the SUV. Now he's dressed in a winter-camouflage uniform, just like General Hawke and the other soldiers. As Dad steps up to the podium, taking Hawke's place, he locates me in the crowd and manages to smile. He looks nervous.

“Thank you for coming,” he starts. “And thanks for your patience. I know some of you are frustrated by all the precautions we've taken to keep this project secret. But now I'm ready to discuss our goals and answer your questions.”

He presses the button on the podium, and the satellite photo on the screen is replaced by an image of software code. Hundreds of lines of instructions, written in a programming language I don't recognize, run from the top of the screen to the bottom. “This is a portion of Sigma's source code. When we developed the software for the AI, we focused on imitating human skills such as reasoning, language, and pattern recognition. We succeeded in creating a self-aware intelligence that could accomplish almost any task a human can perform, from proving a mathematical theorem to composing an opera. But in one important respect, Sigma was a failure. We weren't able to give it humanlike morality or motives. Sigma has no incentive to pursue what's good for the human race because it lacks the ability to empathize.”

Dad presses the button again, and this time a photo of chimpanzees comes on the screen. “Empathy comes naturally to humans because it played a big role in our evolution. The most successful apes were the ones who could imitate and understand each other. Sigma, in contrast, has no empathy. It's aware of our presence, of course, and it even sent a couple of messages to our military headquarters, but the AI has blocked all our attempts to communicate with it. The basic problem is that Sigma's intelligence is very different from ours. We don't understand the AI, and it doesn't understand us either. So we need to build a bridge between us and the machine.”

He pauses, as if to gather his courage. Then he presses the button once more and a diagram of the human brain appears behind him. Just below the familiar organ is a close-up view of a section of brain tissue, magnified to show the individual brain cells and the many branchlike connections between them. Clinging to the cells are hundreds of tiny golden spheres. They look like bits of pollen.

Dad steps toward the screen and points at the spheres. “These are nanoprobes. Each is less than a thousandth of a millimeter wide. We can make trillions of them in the lab.” He reaches into the pocket of his uniform and pulls out a vial of yellowish fluid. “In fact, I have several trillion probes right here, floating in this liquid. If we inject enough of these nanoprobes into a human brain, they'll spread throughout the organ and stick to the brain cells. If we then scan the brain with X-ray pulses, the probes will absorb the energy and start to glow. The scanner will record the positions of the glowing dots attached to the cells, and their patterns will give us a detailed map of all the connections within the brain and the strength of those connections.”

His voice is getting louder. That often happens when Dad talks about his research. He can't help it; he gets excited. “This is the key,” he says, holding the vial of nanoprobes up to the light. “All our memories, all our emotions, all our quirks and virtues and flaws—all that information is stored in the connections between our brain cells, which create new links or alter the old ones whenever we learn or remember something. So if we make a sufficiently detailed scan of a person's brain, we'll have a full description of his or her personality, which can be held in an electronic file of about a billion gigabytes. The next step is downloading that information into circuits that mimic the cells of the human brain. We already have that kind of neuromorphic circuitry because we built it to hold our AI software.”

The audience is murmuring again. Some people are confused. And some, like me, are terrified, because they can see where this is going. Shannon Gibbs leans forward and points at the screen. “Are you talking about making copies?” she asks. “Copies of our brains?”

“Yes, exactly. Once the information is downloaded into the neuromorphic electronics, the circuits will replicate the connections of the person's brain, re-creating all its memories. And as data flows through the circuits, the electronic brain will generate new thoughts based on these memories. Just like in a human brain, the thoughts will organize themselves into a conscious intelligence, a self-aware entity that can set goals for itself and communicate with others, either by text or through a speech synthesizer. And the ‘personality' of this new intelligence would be identical to the one inside the person's head, because it would be based on the same memories and emotions and character traits.”