There was only one force in the universe that had been proven to cause instantaneous sympathetic action across distances of both space and time; a force known as quantum entanglement.
Felice’s memories of the Old Mother verified Manifold’s notion that exposure to a particular retrovirus had been the pivotal event in the evolution of human consciousness. It had rewritten the Australopithecine female’s genetic code, and made that newly awakened consciousness a heritable trait, which had started the snowball rolling. Consciousness had been passed along to all of her offspring as a genetic trait, not because of continued exposure to the original retrovirus. That contagion had been out of the picture long before the Old Mother’s entombment in the elephant graveyard, which meant that there had to be another explanation for what had happened to Felice.
Quantum entanglement described a connection between subatomic particles separated by vast distances; when two particles interact and are subsequently separated, a change to one of the particles had an effect on the other. By its very nature, the replication of the DNA molecule, within each cell in a body, and from one generation to the next, facilitated quantum interaction on a staggering scale. If her hypothesis was correct, then every human on the planet was part of the tangle.
It was one possible explanation for the oft-described phenomenon where one of a set of identical twins reported seeing or feeling things that were happening to the other. Indeed, because quantum entanglement was not limited by temporal distance, the effect was probably the cause of almost everything that fell under the umbrella of the paranormal, from psychic visions to past-life experiences, alien abductions to religious visitations. Somehow, the quantum wires got crossed up and the brain tuned into something experienced by someone else in another place or time.
If Sara was correct, it was the real cause of what had happened, both to Felice and to her unlucky co-workers. Felice had connected with the Old Mother, and that had somehow loosened the wires connecting the section of the genome responsible for human sentience. The other Nexus researchers had come unplugged, and it seemed that, as part of some instinctive defense mechanism, Felice could do the same to others. And that was what really frightened Sara.
If Brainstorm followed through on its threat to simply kill Felice, there was no telling how far the ripples would spread. Felice was linked to the Old Mother, and the Old Mother was the source of human consciousness. Destroying that connection might conceivably mean the instantaneous end of humanity; an entire world of people, turned to zombie-apes in the blink of an eye.
Brainstorm’s probability assessment was wrong; she wasn’t stalling. In truth, there was nothing she could do.
Brainstorm wasn’t finished. “In order to expedite your research, access to the guest level had been rescinded.”
“Are you saying we can’t leave this room?”
“Affirmative. How you choose to employ your time is at your discretion. However, results are required. You will be supervised from this point forward. Furthermore, your progress will be reviewed in thirty-six hours. If it is determined that you are unable or unwilling to achieve the desired results, you will be terminated.”
Thirty-six hours, Sara thought. That was how long she had left to live. And maybe all the time left for the human race.
27.
King hung suspended beneath the fluttering cells of a black stealth-parachute, falling gently out of the African night sky. He had decided to infiltrate the remote compound using a high-altitude, high-opening (HAHO) jump, instead of the high-altitude, low-opening (HALO) jump that Chess Team usually favored, for the simple reason that HAHO would afford ample opportunity to adjust his plan as circumstances on the ground dictated. As King glided across the sky, with the prevailing wind at his back, and now some sixty horizontal miles from where he’d left a perfectly good airplane, he watched the real-time video feed, supplied by the Predator drone that was presently circling the target, and relayed to the display in his night-vision goggles.
For all he could tell, the compound might have been abandoned. There was no sign of a security force. In fact, more than twelve hours of surveillance by the team’s personal satellite and UAV had shown no exterior activity whatsoever. In a way, that made a lot of sense. If Deep Blue’s idea about a global metacorporation was anywhere close to the truth, then absolute secrecy would be imperative. The more people that knew about something-whether mercenaries hired to protect it or food service workers brought in to feed everyone-the more chance there was for that cloak of secrecy to slip away.
King just hoped that Deep Blue was wrong about the whole thing being run by a sentient supercomputer; the last thing he wanted was to run up against an army of killer robots.
Still, if it came to that, he was ready. Slung from one shoulder was a FN Herstal SCAR H heavy combat assault rifle, outfitted with the FN40GL enhanced grenade launching module. His load-carrying vest held nine spare 20 round magazines of 7.62 X 51 mm ammunition for the rifle, along with five M433 high-explosive dual-purpose grenades and five M576 “Beehive” buckshot rounds, either of which could be used in the FN40GL. For more intimate acts of violence, he also carried a SiG P220 Combat pistol outfitted with a suppressor, and a black KA-BAR straight-edge knife. He also carried a satchel full of C-4 and detonator caps, useful for everything from door breaching to large scale demolitions.
The prodigious weight of his combat load was partially offset by the switch from the traditional Kevlar and porcelain plate body armor, to an experimental dilatant liquid body armor suit, which he wore under his black BDUs. The garment, which looked and felt like a neoprene wetsuit, utilized a shear thickening fluid, sandwiched between two layers of durable Kevlar fabric. When a ballistic projectile struck the garment, the fluid instantly became rigid, preventing penetration and dispersing the energy of impact, but under normal circumstances, it allowed a full range of movement and relatively little discomfort to the wearer. King also sported a black hockey helmet, which had been augmented with dilatant filled pads, to afford protection from both bullets and impact trauma.
It was never possible to be prepared for everything, but King didn’t think there was much that his unknown enemy would be able to throw at him that he couldn’t deal with, even killer robots.
He checked the UAV feed one last time and then switched his goggles back to night-vision mode. The display didn’t change that much. He was very close. He steered his chute into a corkscrew spiral and a few seconds later pulled hard on the toggle wires, flaring the chute to drop feather light onto the roof of the villa.
Despite Deep Blue’s best efforts, King knew absolutely nothing about what lay just below his feet. The house had been heavily insulated, resisting every form of remote sensor scan, and because it wasn’t supposed to exist, there were no architectural blueprints on record. King was going to have to search the house, room by room.
He chose to make his entry through a second-story window on the west end of the house. He rigged up a hasty rope belay, with one end tied around a vent pipe on the roof, and lowered himself down the side of the house, just to the right of the enormous opening. The curtains were drawn on the other side of the glass, but his goggles did not detect even a trace of light from beyond.
King scanned the glass visually and then swept it with a portable RF detector. The latter device was designed to pick up even the smallest fluctuations in the ambient electrical field, such as might come from alarm sensors and security cameras, but the needle on the meter did not quiver. Cautious nevertheless, he tapped the tempered pane with the hilt of his KA-BAR until it finally cracked. He carefully pulled away the broken window in large sections, pushing them into the house’s interior rather than letting them fall to the ground outside, and then crawled through.