“Wife?” Chen said.
“Husband!” The speaker burst to life. The voice carried relief, hope, near hysteria.
“Su-Yong.”
“Chen! Chen! Chen! You’ve come for me thank God. Please, Chen, I’m in trouble trouble double please I need the clone need stabilization need organic brain brain input clone please Chen please…”
Babbling. This is what she’d been reduced to.
“Wife, please. I’ve come to ask you about the equivalence theorem.”
“They’re going to kill me Chen they killed me already CIA killed me Americans killed me buried me you buried me please help neural input need a brain a clone please please before it’s too late please Chen…”
“There is no clone, wife. The equivalence theorem. You proved it, didn’t you? How?”
“MAKE ONE.” The voice came out at the maximum volume. “MAKE ONE MAKE ONE MAKE ONE MAKE ONE…” and on and on.
“The equivalence theorem, wife! Tell me. Tell me,” he lied, “and I’ll help you!”
Ling’s mind reached out for the connection that led to the next level.
But there was nothing. A dead end.
What?
She turned to the schematics. They didn’t extend that far. They showed data lines heading down, but not where they terminated. She struggled to understand, searched for explanation.
There, an operations guide. She consumed it, and then she understood.
Her mother was physically isolated a thousand meters down. The connection was physically disconnected. There was no way to reach her mother at all.
“Ling Shu, it’s time for your lesson!” The tutor pulled her hard, yanking her around to face the old woman. Ling tripped and fell to her knees. “Owwww!”
Shu stopped, aghast.
The equivalence theorem? The EQUIVALENCE THEOREM???
That’s why Chen had come. Despair smothered the hope she’d felt. He wasn’t here to help her. He was here to wring one last bit of value out of her. She’d married this man. She’d loved him. She’d tried to make a child with him.
Oh, Chen. Oh, Chen.
The voice from the speaker suddenly went silent.
Chen blinked, surprised.
Then his wife spoke again.
“Chen Chen husband Chen please if you ever loved me ever cared please help please.”
Chen hardened himself.
“The equivalence theorem,” he repeated. “Give it to me, then I’ll help you.”
“PLEASE HUSBAND.” Chen flinched as his dead wife’s voice boomed at painful volume. “PLEASE HELP BRING ME A CLONE OR LING HUSBAND BRING ME LING MY DAUGHTER LING LING LING PLEASE LING…” The voice descended into sobbing even as it screamed Ling’s name. Chen hit a switch and turned off the speakers.
What had he expected? It was like the first time. Except this time there would be no clone. The hardliners would not allow it.
“Damn it!” He slammed his hand down on the console. The proof, if it was practical, would allow quantum acceleration of any classical algorithm, not just the small minority that achieved massive speedups on quantum systems now. It would be worth billions, tens of billions. It would win him the Nobel Prize. But it was out of reach now.
Chen took a deep breath, forced himself to act normally. He filed away the system test results, made sure all the cameras and audio pickups that led to the Quantum Cluster were deactivated, then logged off of the terminal.
The blast doors and elevator doors opened for him, and then closed behind him once more, and the elevator began its slow ascent to the surface.
“Owwww!” Ling yelled as the tutor wrenched her around and she fell to her knees and bit her tongue.
“Ling, your break is over, young lady! It’s time for your lessons.”
“No!” Ling yelled in frustration. No, her mother couldn’t be trapped! No no no no no!
She tried to pull her arm back but the tutor’s grip was too strong. She reached out with her mind instead, grabbed hold of the woman’s phone in anger, forced it to discharge its battery. The tutor jumped back with a scream, alarmed by the sudden jolt of pain from her pocket. Then she reached forward and slapped Ling, hard, knocking her against the glass window.
“AAAAAAA!!” Ling screamed and reached out to the apartment around her. The oven threw its door open and came on with a burst of flame. The fireplace jolted to life. The cooking bot activated and began sharpening its knives. The closet door opened and the cleaning bots emerged, their fans whirring. The music system and viewscreens came on at painful volume.
The tutor looked around her, eyes wide, and turned and ran for the door.
Ling turned her mind back to Jiao Tong.
NO NO NO NO NO!
She threw herself at the connection, but it was futile. She slammed her tiny fists against the glass of the window, to no effect. Physical disconnection. She hated the physical world, the world where she was so puny and weak, hated it, hated it, hated it!
Ling reached out in anger and frustration, grabbed hold of the network nodes of the Secure Computing Center, and wrenched at them in every way she could. Immediately her connection to the place ended, but the anger was still with her, so she reached out to the city around her, pushed her mind into its cars and its power stations and its buildings and its traffic routing and surveillance bots and RIPPED.
She heard the explosions as the substations blew, saw sparks somewhere out there, and then a wave of darkness swept away the lights of the great city, advancing block by block, like a wave of dominoes falling. The building-sized porcelain face of Zhi Li winked at Ling one more time, and then blinked out of existence, along with the lights of the whole block, of Ling’s flat, and every building within sight.
And finally, Ling felt calm returning.
Ling Shu stared out the window of her pitch-black flat, tears falling from her eyes, her tiny chest heaving as she caught her breath, and watched the hundreds of red-lit surveillance drones plunge to the street below, like stars falling from the sky, as the rain pounded on the suddenly still and darkened city.
The elevator came to an abrupt halt two hundred meters up. The lights died and the status indicator switched from ISOLATION IN EFFECT to
LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT
And suddenly Chen Pang knew fear.
“Help!” he screamed. “Help!” He beat against the doors of the darkened elevator. “Help!”
But no one heard him.
15
MEANS, MOTIVE, OPPORTUNITY
Friday October 19th
Holtzmann napped when he arrived home late morning, rose again around 2 o’clock, feeling better, and was awake when Anne came home in the afternoon.
“I’m fine,” he assured her in the kitchen, “fine.”
“Did you talk to Dr Baxter?”
“Yes,” he lied. “He fit me in. He thinks it was just stress.”
Anne frowned. “I think you have PTSD, Martin. They have therapy for that, you know.”
Holtzmann kept his eyes on the counter. “I’ll be OK, Anne. This won’t happen again.”
Anne crossed the kitchen, laid her palm on his cheek until he met her eyes.
“Promise me you’ll see Dr Baxter again?”
Holtzmann looked into those eyes, of this strong, intelligent woman that had been so good to him for so long.
He reached up and put his hand over hers. “I will.”
He worked in his home office, catching up on events.
After an hour, Anne announced that she was having dinner with Claire Becker. Warren’s widow was still having a hard time accepting his sudden death, and her new situation as a single mother of two teenage girls. Holtzmann felt guilty that he hadn’t reached out to her since the funeral. He and Becker had been colleagues for almost a decade, friends for most of that time. Surely he owed Clair more than a hug and condolences six months ago?