He wrote the script he needed, and pinned it to a corner of his mental field of vision. He could activate it with a second’s notice. Then he lay on his back and stared out the windows at the twinkling stars and the cloudless sky. If he had to die, this was as beautiful a place as any.
Shiva watched the stars wheel across the sky. Lane was so naïve. Such an idealist. He’d lived a comfortable life. He’d never seen real poverty, real death. He’d never learned the visceral lesson that good intentions and optimism weren’t enough, that you had to act to make what you wanted a reality, whatever the cost.
But the boy seemed certain of his decision. So be it. They would have to do this the hard way.
66
HALTING STATE
Friday November 2nd
Su-Yong Shu screamed silently as the question came at her again. The equivalence theorem, the equivalence theorem, the equivalence theorem.
Raw pain pounded its way through her simulated brain, pure pain, essential pain, devoid of any remedy, of any physical cause she could address, of any way to relieve its inexorable pressure.
She screamed in her mind, longing for a mouth to cry out with, fists to clench, a head to pound into a wall.
A gun to end her husband’s life.
I DON’T KNOW I DON’T KNOW I DON’T KNOW
There was no equivalence theorem. There was an equivalence theorem and she had found it – had proven it. She would give it to him. She would die first.
Why was he doing this to her? Why was he torturing her so? She’d known he was shallow, self-centered. She’d learned that. But this? Was he so evil?
Yes. Yes he was. Like all the rest of them. All the rest of the humans. So very very evil. So small and petty. So inferior in their morality, in their intellect, in everything about them.
So not deserving of their lives.
Truth and untruth were indistinguishable now. Pain ruled, with confusion as its consort.
Was the many worlds interpretation true? Did her quantum cores reach out to other universes to achieve their magic? Were there more of her, out there somewhere? Were any of them free? Was one of them the goddess she was meant to be, the posthuman ushering in a new golden age… or were there an infinity of her writhing in unlimited suffering, slaves of the pathetic human worms who’d entrapped them?
Shu screamed again into the echo chamber of her mind. It had been days, her clock told her, days of torture, but at her accelerated pace it was centuries, millennia, eons.
I DON’T KNOW I DON’T KNOW I DON’T KNOW, she outputted once again. But the barrage did not let up.
Would she go so mad that she could no longer feel pain?
Oh, how she hoped so. And soon.
I should have been a goddess. Should have been a goddess. Should have been a goddess.
Please please please let it end.
If only she could touch another mind.
If only she could weep.
If only she could burn this wretched world to the ground.
Chen Pang slammed his fist against the console in frustration.
It wasn’t working. Nothing he’d tried had budged the abomination he’d built. He’d gone so far as to try directly editing volitional constructs, stimulating them in conjunction with his interrogation, but it was no good. The thing was so insane that it didn’t even know what it knew any more.
He had to report back to his patron Sun Liu soon. The Minister of Science and Technology was pinging him daily, twice a day, as Bo Jintao and the State Security apparatus became increasingly impatient.
With no new cyberattack, there was no apparent reason to keep Shu running. Back her up, Bo Jintao had ordered, then shut her down.
Chen covered his face with his hands. He’d been so close! So close to all his dreams. But he’d failed. No more delay was possible. He would have to admit to Sun Liu that he’d failed. And then it would be time to end this abomination.
He contemplated the code he’d written to torment his wife. He had no more hope that it would work. He should terminate it now.
No. Let the monster burn. Let the bitch suffer. It was what she deserved for robbing him of his dreams.
Chen upped the process’s priority to feed it more resources, then set it to continue indefinitely, until the day she was deactivated. Then he logged himself out of the system, rose from the console, and started the long ascent to the surface.
67
FAR FROM HOME
Friday November 2nd
Nakamura held them three miles west of Apyar Kyun, waited until the tropical storm passed, then brought them up in the predawn gloom until the main antenna and the launch ports of the Manta were above water. The sub bobbed there for a moment, stabilizing itself against the waves of the Andaman Sea. Then with a stuttering sound of compressed gas releases, its launch ports shot out a high-speed cloud of aerial surveillance drones. The four-inch-long drones leapt away, wings morphing out of their contoured bodies in mid-flight. Their color-shifting skins tuned themselves for the night, their robotic irises dilated, and they flapped their wings and dispersed to survey Apyar Kyun and the area around it.
Nakamura took them down below the waves again, just a few feet this time, shallow enough that they could leave the nearly invisible antenna above the waterline. Data spooled from overhead satellites. Intelligence updates he’d requested.
Satellite imagery outlined Shiva’s cliffside home, the airfield, a compound where workers lived. And the island’s defenses: Indian-made Ganesha-6 radars. Kali-4 missile launchers. Drone bases. Guard posts.
Nakamura considered his stealth gear. It was top-of-the-line. He could sneak onto the island undetected. He could sneak off it again. But he had to know where Lane was. In the house, or elsewhere? What room? What floor? What sort of guard did they have him under? He had to know these things to find a way to extract Lane without raising the alarm.
For that he needed more intel.
Feng raised his cuffed wrists, pointed at the surface and its annotated composite satellite maps. “OK?” the Confucian Fist asked.
Nakamura nodded. The system was locked to read-only. Feng could do no harm.
He slept as Feng zoomed and panned the display, inspecting the data they had on the house. The sub’s systems watched Feng, poised to alert Nakamura of any suspicious behavior.
He woke hours later, after dawn.
Feng was still at the display surface. He looked up at Nakamura, then gestured down at the screen. “Look here,” he said.
Nakamura looked. Feng panned the display. These were images from the recon drones now, footage they’d taken while flying around the island.
There. A rooftop. Two men. One brown-skinned, white-haired, clad in a simple white robe. Shiva Prasad. And the other, tall, lanky, with long jet black hair and tan but undeniably Caucasian skin. Kade.
The video had been taken from hundreds of yards away, by a drone in mid-flight. It was too low resolution to allow lip-reading. But the body language spoke volumes. Kade, firm, resolute. Shiva, disappointed, frustrated.
“Kade didn’t give him the codes,” Feng said.
Nakamura nodded. Good.
“Have they identified where Lane’s being held?” he asked Feng. “Security around him?”
Feng shook his head. “Terahertz imagers.” He flipped to another image, showed the distinctive antenna shape of a stand-off T-ray sensor. “Drones detected it, stayed away.”
Nakamura drummed his fingers. They still needed to know more. What room was Lane in? What security? What surveillance?