Several of the audience jumped to their feet, unsure if this was part of the show or real. Secretary Falk’s Secret Service detail held their ground, however; they’d been briefed on what to expect. The American marine from the first three scenarios put his gun on the ground and raised his hands. He was quickly tied and blindfolded.
She was ready for this. With a sister on the police force and a brother in Force Recon, she’d been around guns for years, knew how to handle and shoot them. Sean had even sneaked her and Sandra onto the base one evening and let them go through the MARSOC shoot house. She’d helped to choreograph a lot of this fight, working closely with the military guys who consulted for Lockheed Martin. She took a few deep breaths, willing her muscles to relax.
The Turks pointed their weapons at the stage. “Secretary Falk,” said the one with the dynamite, speaking English with no trace of a Turkish accent. “Instruct your men to put their weapons on the ground.”
CHAPTER 4
Ryan Oronzi was barely watching the demonstration. He was stuck in the VIP section by Babington’s decree, but he had his tablet with him and was using it to study the logs from the control system around his baby universe. Energies from his universe had been used to create the Higgs projectors, and they drew a lot of their power from it. Ryan was watching to make sure the intelligence inside didn’t make another break for freedom.
It was the last scenario now, the one in which the girl would escape from supposed terrorists. Everything had been stable so far, the monitor levels normal, but… there was a pattern. Something wrong, something that snagged at Ryan’s subconscious. He had learned not to ignore the part of his mind that noticed such things.
It was Ryan’s mind, after all, that made him special. He had always known, from his earliest memories, that he was different from other people. Better. He had insights they couldn’t fathom, saw patterns too complicated for others to perceive. When he was young, he had even fantasized that he wasn’t really human. He had imagined himself as a member of an alien race of superior intellect, who had placed his mind into a human body to guide the human race to a higher level of knowledge or achievement. It wasn’t a thought he had entirely given up on, but he had learned not to mention it to other people.
Ryan brought up a modeling engine on his tablet and starting plugging in the data from the last half hour. His greatest fear was that whatever was on the other side of the wormhole would solve his latest protocol and escape. He didn’t know what would happen if it did, but he didn’t want to find out.
Nobody else believed his claims that the patterns in the wormhole were produced by an intelligence acting on the other side. It was a hard thing to defend. The patterns fluctuated with apparent randomness. Even Nicole thought that his equations were just failing to adequately predict and contain them. But he could tell the difference. No random fluctuations could outsmart the traps he was setting, and certainly not with increasing speed.
He studied the data. To his relief, none of the numbers he saw came anywhere close to exceeding the latest protocol. None of his proximity alarms had been tripped. This latest set of equations was holding up better. But no.
There was a pattern to the numbers. A chill went down his back as he recognized it. The numbers shadowed the solution to the equations, only an order of magnitude smaller. The intelligence was getting more clever. It was intentionally solving the puzzle in a way that avoided tripping his proximity alarms. In fact, it had already solved it. It was hiding its tracks, so that it could break out all at once, denying Ryan the chance to apply another protocol when it started to get close. Which mean that it, too, recognized that there was an intelligent being on the other side of the wormhole. It knew Ryan was there.
Ryan leaped to his feet, interrupting the scenario. “Run!” he shouted. “Everyone out, right now!”
Babington’s hand closed on his shoulder like a vise. “They’re not really terrorists, remember? It’s part of the show.” The closest member of Secretary Falk’s security detail chuckled.
“You don’t understand—it’s the intelligence,” Ryan said. “I warned you to cancel…”
“And I warned you to keep your mouth shut,” Babington growled, trying to steer him away from the stage.
On the floor, the abducted girl sprang into action. The big screen showed her viewpoint, revealing that she, too, was wearing eyejack lenses connected to a Higgs projector. The dynamite-vested soldier was flung away over a wall. A fiery explosion on the other side cued rousing action-movie theme music as the girl ripped the guns out of the other soldiers’ hands. One man pulled a backup pistol from his vest and fired at the girl’s head, but it was his compatriot on her other side who collapsed. The big screen showed the bullet blurring around the girl’s head in slow motion and striking the soldier behind her. In moments, all the soldiers were down, leaving only the girl, brushing off her hands. The audience erupted into applause, including the Secretary of Defense, who was beaming.
“You see?” Babington hissed into Ryan’s ear.
“No,” Ryan shouted over the music. “Everyone needs to get out of here. We have to shut it all down!”
Babington just glared at him, and Ryan gave up. He huddled over his tablet. His only chance was to change the protocol again before the intelligence made its move. He had no idea what it might do if it escaped, but he knew how clever it was, and how powerful. Ryan still had several backup protocols queued up, though it was getting harder to make them complex enough to hold the thing inside for more than a few days.
The lights went out. The pounding music fell suddenly silent, and the applause died away. Even Ryan’s tablet, though it had its own battery source, fell black and dead. Ryan whipped out his phone. Nothing.
“Staker, what is this?” Secretary Falk asked. “Another scenario? We weren’t briefed on this.”
The lights came back on. The audience members breathed sighs of relief, looked at each other and smiled, but Ryan stayed frozen. Falk’s security detail were on their feet, not laughing anymore, surrounding the Secretary.
Behind them, Secretary Falk stood. When Ryan saw him, he started to moan softly, uncontrollably. Falk had no eyes. Where his eyes should have been was only a flat mask of skin, as if they had never been there. Ryan knew at once that this wasn’t the Secretary at all. It was the intelligence. The thing that wasn’t Secretary Falk looked around with its missing eyes. It seemed relaxed, unconcerned.
One of the Secret Service agents looked back and noticed, his eyes going wide with shock. “Sir? Are you all right, sir?” Falk brushed his hand casually through the air. The agent who had spoken collapsed to the ground and lay motionless.
The other two agents drew their pistols and took shooting stances. “Sir, please sit down,” one of them said. The other started talking on his radio, calling for backup.
Falk stepped toward the closest agent with an expression of curiosity. He reached for the agent’s gun. “Don’t do that, sir,” the agent said. Falk touched the gun, which crumpled away like burning paper. The other agent fired at Falk, but the bullet blurred around him, just like in the demo scenarios, and blasted harmlessly into the wall. The first agent, now unarmed, picked up a chair and swung it down as hard as he could on Falk’s head. This time, it was Falk that blurred, like a vibrating tuning fork, causing the chair to crash uselessly to the floor. Falk gestured and both agents fell to the ground where they lay, unmoving.