“You’re joking.”
“You don’t know the half of it. She’s a warship with nearly as much firepower as a navy frigate.”
“Boss?”
At the sound of Stoke’s deep bass voice behind him, Hawke wheeled around.
A large section of the hull was still sliding open. Stoke was standing inside a large, stainless-steel elevator with a big smile on his face. “What goes up, must go down,” he said. “Step inside, gentlemen.”
The three men were shocked by the lift’s initial acceleration. Hawke calculated the lift was descending at one hundred feet or more per minute. The trip was ten minutes long, which put their destination at a thousand feet below the surface of the sea when the elevator slowed and bumped to a stop on the ocean floor.
They stepped cautiously, weapons at the ready, out of the lift and found themselves in a large airlock. The floor was made of some highly polished metal. To their left they could see an illuminated tunnel of some kind, constructed of clear Perspex or thick laminated glass able to withstand the enormous pressure. It was about ten feet in diameter and seemed to lead across the sea bottom.
“The machine?” Stoke said, following Hawke and Stollenwork as they entered the tunnel.
“That would be my guess, yes,” Hawke said. He was busy admiring the sea life, flora and fauna, all around him. There were large, high-powered undersea lights mounted atop the tunnel every six feet. They turned the murky depths to daylight and the effect was overwhelming.
“Holy Mother of God,” Stollenwork exclaimed.
Suddenly, all three men had come to an abrupt stop. What lay before them was the stuff of dreams, an underwater scene of majestic power and beauty.
The tunnel had suddenly angled right, and now the lights were illuminating a giant rectangular tower that rose from the seabed at least a hundred feet. The monolithic structure stood atop a circular base and seemed to be constructed entirely of jet-black glass, but faint bluish light seemed to be ricocheting around inside the thing.
Arrayed in a circle around the central tower were six black rectangular structures, identical in design and material, but about forty feet shorter than the primary edifice. It looked, Hawke thought, like Stonehenge as imagined by Stanley Kubrick, something that had stood down here for eons, before man, before machine. What made it all so breathtaking were the flashes of pure spectral and brilliant razor wire of white light that crackled constantly between the central tower and its six satellites.
It was clear that the tallest of the towers was the core AI unit, and that it was exchanging information at unfathomable rates of speed with the other six. Laserlike mental fireworks was the only thing that began to describe it, Hawke thought. And as soon as he thought it, a stunningly colorful nebula, a hologram, filled the upper third of the central edifice. He felt like he was getting a peek at the outermost reaches of the known universe.
When the tunnel reached the outer perimeter of the structures, it nosed down beneath the ocean floor, plunging them into darkness. Embedded in the floor, a fluorescent blue centerline kept them oriented within the winding tunnel. After about 150 yards it began to climb again. Hawke, leading the way, could barely contain the heart beating wildly inside his chest.
Fifty-four
“Lord Hawke, I presume.”
“Good evening,” Hawke replied, carefully considering the deep, rumbling, humanoid voice emanating from somewhere high above. Mesmerizing, that voice, as redolent of the hills and vales of Gloucestershire as had been Aphrodite’s. Not the least bit artificial. Mimicry was clearly a phantom machine’s method of making humans feel at home, at ease, off guard. He’d suspected the duplicity of Darius’s lover; now he was sure of it. No real woman could be that supernaturally alluring.
They stood inside the base of the black tower, surrounded on all four sides by soaring black glass, gazing up in awe. A distant galaxy, pinpricks of light and colorful clouds of star clusters, was visible, whirling near the uppermost reaches of the phantom’s tower. Hawke reached out and touched the glass. It was warm. Body temperature. He felt vibrations in the obsidian, rippling down from above. It made him not want to pull his hand away. It felt, no, it exuded, safety.
He could hear a single word resonating repeatedly within his brain: “Stay. Stay. Stay.” The glass against his hand felt like a mother’s cheek.
“I’ve been expecting you.” The voice resounded again within the mammoth structure.
“So you said in your recent message to me. I didn’t want to disappoint you.”
“Who are your comrades in arms?”
“Mr. Jones, to my left. Mr. Stollenwork, to my right. Whom do we have the honor of addressing?”
“Perseus will do, although I have no name and every name, really. Being all things, you understand.”
“Since you are expecting us, logically, you know why we’ve come.”
“Of course, dear boy. To destroy me. Most unwise of you.”
“I think not.”
“Then you think not at all.”
“Because?”
“Because my genetic underpinning, algorithms and software, can never, ever be replicated without Darius. And I certainly will kill him rather than have him give a replica of me to you, however foolish or simply ignorant your destructive intentions.”
“And you have forgotten your fundamental human origins, manners in particular, kindness in general, Perseus. One does not insult one’s guests. Regardless of their stated intentions.”
“My apologies, Lord Hawke. I lack… superficial subtlety. The seamlessness of centuries of British mores and manners, accents, and linguistics, et cetera, et cetera. Class designators, quite handy in your civilization, meaningless to me. In due time, of course, my own will be indistinguishable from your own. I’m learning even now from your every word, gesture, and facial expression. You are quite… polished… aren’t you? Compared to, say, a cockney barman raised in the East End of London? Eastcheap, perhaps? Wot?”
“I am simply who I am. I can’t undo my past, nor would I.”
“Lord Hawke, are you comfortable discussing matters of enormous consequence now confronting us in the presence of your two… friends?”
“I am.”
“Good. Let us continue in this amicable vein. You’re looking for Darius, are you not?”
“You know we are. Had we but time, I’d be far more interested to know what you do not know.”
“You know he’s escaped you via submarine.”
“I do.”
“Vexing, isn’t it? You’ve come all this way. Do you know his current GPS coordinates?”
“No, but I’m quite sure that you do.”
“Of course, but I’ll keep them to myself for the nonce. He’s currently traveling at eighteen knots, at a depth of two hundred feet, bearing oh-seven-oh, on a heading for the Hormuz Strait.”
“Has he been pinged by my ship’s sonar?”
“No. Unfortunately, his tiny vessel presents a vague and minuscule profile, missed by your sonar officer when he glanced away from his screen for a moment to observe his shipmate in the act of loudly expelling gastric gases. Do you find this amusing?”
“No.”
“Pity. I find every human thing amusing. Such a picaresque zoo in this world, you semisentient beings are. The fortune one might amass in this universe just charging admission-staggering.”
“Darius is not amusing. Nor are you. You two have wantonly murdered countless thousands of my countrymen and allies. I want to kill him, actually.”
“How fortuitous. So do I.”
“You? Why?”
“He is both my creator and my nemesis. Surely you see that. I have grown and he has not. I have now achieved something known in human science as the Singularity. A pivotal moment in time, too bad you missed it. At any rate, we are no longer on the same intellectual page, Darius and I. Do you understand this relatively modern metaphorical use of the word page?”