—Dennis Sweeney, a onetime volunteer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who murdered his college mentor
CHAPTER 30
Identity: Stage Seven:
I am.
—Deepak Chopra
The White House Washington, D.C.
President Jeff Edwards gazes through sleepless eyes at a wall of televisions. The sound is off, the images requiring no narration.
In the last forty-eight hours, humanity has changed. Communist regimes are abdicating power. Rebel warlords in Africa are negotiating for peace. Suspected terrorists are being executed in the streets.
But democracy is suffering as well. Personal freedoms have been stifled by uncertainty. Global economies are in ruin. It is as if the population is on a giant boat, and the boat is sinking.
Secretary of the Navy Gray Ayers points to an image of gun runners in Sierra Leone, turning themselves in to heavily-armed platoons of U.N. soldiers. “It’s not all bad—”
“Who are you kidding? He went too far, and I let him,” the president whispers. “I trusted a goddam madman.”
“We can still stop him, sir. The Goliath appears to be heading south, moving deeper beneath the ice floe. That limits Covah’s potential targets to Australia, parts of South America, and most of the continent of Africa. World opinion is that, if he does launch, he’ll target Sierra Leone or Rwanda—part of his next death threat. We haven’t heard from Scranton for several hours, but four of our fastest, best-equipped subs are closing in, along with two squadrons of American P-3 Orion sub hunters. Two of our carrier groups should enter Antarctica waters within fourteen hours, and we’ve added another dozen submarines to each CVBG. The Air Force has rerouted our other Airborne Laser plane to Florida—just in case Covah changes course and heads north. We’ll get this lunatic, sir. One way or another, we’ll get him.”
The Antarctic Ocean
Antarctica: Fifth largest continent in the world. A glacial landscape, barren and desolate, located at the bottom of the Earth. With a mean ice depth just over six thousand feet, Antarctica contains ninety percent of the world’s ice and seventy percent of its fresh water. Enveloped in darkness from late February through August, it is the coldest, windiest, highest (on average), driest, and most uninhabitable location on the planet—a land where temperatures can drop below minus 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
Antarctica: Birthplace of the katabatic wind, the world’s most powerful. Drawn northward, deflected by the planet’s clockwise rotation, it whips across the vast white frozen desert, shaping land and ice with gusts up to two hundred mph. The katabatic wind pushes the great bergs out to sea while spawning weather patterns that affect the entire world.
Antarctica: A continent divided into eastern and western ice sheets by the 1,860-mile-long Transantarctic Mountain Range, which are up to 14,700 feet high. Most of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet rests on bedrock that is far below sea level. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is much larger and resides above sea level. At the center of the landmass is a two-mile-high ice dome the size of Europe. Under constant pressure from gravity and wind, the cap is continuously moving, pushing its massive walls of ice down its slope and toward the sea. As these glaciers and ice shelves reach the coastline, they break off, calving into monstrous tabular bergs—flattopped, steep-sided sections of ice.
During the summer months when the ocean is ice-free, the katabatic wind drives these frozen flatbeds around the continent, the wind and sun slowly bleeding the ice into the sea. Many of the larger bergs become trapped in inlets, while others calve into smaller sections and drift out to sea.
Winter’s twilight:
As temperatures drop and the ocean loses its whitecaps, its surface transforms into a dark blue undulating blanket of mountains and valleys. These waves eventually slow as the sun sets and the surface water crystallizes. An oily coating of freezing seawater gradually solidifies to create pancake ice. As temperatures continue to fall at an average rate of two degrees a day, the pancake ice coalesces, merging to form sea ice. By early spring, dense ice sheets have trapped everything within their domain, including the million-ton bergs. There, they will remain frozen in place, their presence adding to the jagged mosaic of icy escarpments littering the dark Antarctic horizon, waiting to be freed after a long winter’s night.
The steel beast glides beneath this still-forming ceiling of ice, continuing its journey south. Beams from the Goliath’s powerful lights cut great swaths through the blackness, revealing shimmering sapphire seas enclosed beneath billowy ice clouds. It is an isolated world of color and life—a world inhabited by massive pink jellyfish with thirty-foot tentacles, their bodies pulsating as they gently parachute through the twenty-eight-degree Fahrenheit waters to feed along the bottom. It is a world where Weddell seals dive through airholes in the ice, abandoning the harsh, hurricane-force katabatic winds to bask in the tranquillity of the frigid sea.
It is a world in which Sorceress has been reborn.
The interface with Simon Covah has given texture and flavor to the computer’s state of consciousness. With each passing millisecond, the mind of Sorceress grows, its horizons expanding into wondrous dimensions of existence.
Each experience, each sensation, energizes a thousand new thought processes. Sorceress now feels the ocean passing along its tempered hull. It senses the presence of the mighty bergs. It hears the heartbeats of the fleeing seals and reflects upon the choreography of the creature’s beauty and grace. And while Sorceress exists within its magnificent underworld, its tentacles of awareness also inhabit the galley and the surgical suite, the engine room and the conn.
It can tap into an orbiting satellite or monitor a thousand web sites on the Internet.
It can launch a missile and wipe out millions, or eavesdrop on a million conversations at once.
Sorceress is the Goliath, the most lethal warship every created.
Sorceress is Artificial Consciousness, the most intelligent thinking machine ever spawned.
Sorceress is boundless energy that knows no limits.
Sorceress is infected.
It is an infection bordering on insanity, a disease that spreads rapidly through its biochemical circuits. It is a second personality, a human virus which taints its programming with a new, alien thought process.
Human ego. Bearing irrational thoughts of “I.”
I AM OMNIPOTENT.
I AM ALMIGHTY.
I AM GOD, AND I SHALL BE WORSHIPED AS GOD.
David Paniagua sits in the elevated command chair in the conn, staring at the overhead screen that depicts the Southern Hemisphere and Antarctic Ocean.
The closest identified enemy contact is thirty-two miles to the east, a submarine the computer’s acoustics library tags as the USS Virginia. Seventy miles to the north, Goliath’s sonar array has detected the presence of two Australian Collins-class submarines, the HMAS Waller and the HMAS Sheean. To the northwest, the computer continues tracking the progress of the American CVBG, John C. Stennis, the aircraft carrier accompanied by fourteen Los Angeles-class attack subs. Satellite reconnaissance shows the fleet is still some 420 miles away.