“But this isn’t clear,” Tyler said.
Parnes walked over to one of the computer terminals and punched up a demo. “Yes. We haven’t figured that part out yet, but the point is that the core started to create paths within the electrolyte.” As he spoke, an animation of the core appeared on the screen. Over a 3-D graphic, first a few, then more and increasingly more arcs of lines spanned the core, indicating new circuits, bridging the chips inside and out of the sphere. “The geometry of the core and the paths of electrons created billions of new nodes and pathways around the hard-wired network.”
“Like neural connectors in the brain,” Admiral Parks said.
“Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“It created its own freaking gray matter. I’ll be a son of a bitch.”
“And the result was an unlimited number of new connections firing off at the will of whatever signal path the core needed,” Parnes added. “It created, conservatively, another millionfold increase in speed and, hence, power.”
“Now we are up to … holy shit … 36 trillion times one of the processors.”
“Thirty-six trillion times faster than the fastest processor on Earth,” Parnes said proudly.
As the elevator doors opened, the major physically pulled his men out. “Go. Go. Go. Go. Go.”
“So what’s the bottom line here?” an anxious Hiccock said, looking up in the direction of the impending blast.
“It thinks! It reasons.”
“Well, ask it to think of a way out of here for all of us.”
“I wish I could. However, ALISON is comprehending and thinking at a seven-year-old’s level. Here, I’ll show you.”
With three wired detonators in front of him, Harry watched the expeditionary force enter the area from the first copter that landed. They scurried and advanced in military fashion, each one gaining a little ground then covering the one behind as he ventured further in front, repeating the maneuver.
Harry checked his watch, looked toward the elevator doors and said under his breath, “Hope you boys didn’t make any stops.” He turned the first magneto pulse detonator. There was a rumble and then a percussive explosion from deep within the elevator shaft. He turned the second, and then quickly the third handle. The last two blasts came in fast sequence. The ceiling of the area collapsed as tons of rock filled the cavity. The Air Cav troops scrambled. Some made it out before a cloud of billowing dust emanated from the structure. The sharp-angled, modern facade of the building slipped and sagged as it, too, crumbled.
The major and his ragtag team took cover on the far side of the area from the elevator shaft. The roar and shuddering from the blast were tremendous. The doors of the elevator started to bulge and buckle with the weight of the mountain falling upon them. They flailed open, ripped to shreds by advancing rock and dirt that began pouring out, creating a wave of roiling earth heading for the men. Dust and debris thickened the air to the consistency of oatmeal and destroyed visibility.
As the choking dust cleared, the soldiers were pushed back as far as they could go. The wall of stone, which had been spilling out from the elevator shaft, had stopped just short of the wall directly behind them. Their spontaneous cheer was quickly stifled by the remnants of choking dust.
Up top, twelve AH 64 Delta Apache Longbow attack helicopters and eight Black Hawks loaded with troops idled as the billowing dust and smoke from the explosion settled. Engles grilled his XO. “Did we set these charges? Did somebody’s pod lose a missile? How did this place blow like this, major?”
“Sir, my guess is it was booby-trapped.”
“Is there any way in?”
“The scout bird scanned the mountain with infra as we came in. Nothing. There’s a few thousand tons of rock between us and them, whoever they are, Sir.”
“Are you telling me there’s no way for us to accomplish this mission?”
“Sir, not without heavy equipment and blasting gear.”
“Then I failed.”
“Sir?”
“If I fail, then I kill myself.”
“Come again, Sir?”
Engles grabbed a grenade from his webbing and pulled the pin.
“What the fuck?” The XO’s eyes bulged at the act of insanity he was witnessing.
Engles focused on the far-off hills and never flinched as his grenade’s five-second fuse smoldered in his hand.
The XO ran and dove as he yelled, “Take cover. Grenade! Live grenade!”
He got about twenty feet before Colonel Engles disappeared in a blast of pink flame. Seven troops were hit with grenade fragments. Pieces of Engles scattered over the ground as if a butcher shop had exploded. Dazed and confused, his men, each one rattled with the horror of having their leader dead by his own hand, attended to the wounded. The XO, still rocked by the suicide, ordered combat air patrol circles. He then broke radio silence and called headquarters for guidance. His call was met with a fervent plea from his controller to call off the attack. This surprised and befuddled the squadron’s second in command, who only moments before was willing to die for his now dead leader.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
As the final echoes from the blast damped out, everyone in the chamber shared a silent moment.
“Well, we’re all here for at least the next twenty-four hours,” Hiccock said.
“Where were we?” Parnes said, as if explosions always interrupted his lectures.
“The seven-year-old,” Tyler said, nodding her head toward the core.
“Ah, yes, thank you. The breakthrough came when ALISON named this,” Parnes referred to a picture of a kitten. Like a father recounting his son’s first steps, he added, “This is very exciting. Developmentally, ALISON learned to identify shapes. She started to respond to square, triangle, ball, etcetera.”
“That’s pattern recognition. No big whoop,” Kronos stated flatly.
“True. Eventually we inputted textures. Hard, soft, smooth, rough, bald, fuzzy. Then something incredible happened. It was the moment when the universe changed. When we got to animals, the very first we scanned in to her was a kitten. And before we could inform her of the name, she outputted …”
“Fur ball,” Tyler said, stealing Parnes’s thunder.
“Fur … ball …” dribbled out of Parnes’s mouth. He turned to Tyler. “Why, yes! How uncannily adept of you.”
“How amazingly inept of you, Parnes. You mean to tell me you built all this, took it this far, created havoc, death, and mayhem, and didn’t think to have anyone other than a digit head on your team?”
“My dear woman, whatever are you raving about?”
“You are either bullshitting us or you are ignorant.”
“Janice, want to let us all in on this?” Hiccock said.
“Koko.” She extended two fingers over the left side of her chest and syncopated them with each K sound, as she articulated “Koko.” She then gave the sign for gorilla, beating on her chest as she spoke the words “the gorilla.” “Parnes, you thought you hit the moment of dissociative thought when two unrelated ideas come together to form a wholly new third idea, not logically traceable to either original concept.”
“Yes, that’s precisely what happened. ALISON reasoned and intuitively applied intelligence to create a nonlogical path to a correct conclusion.”
“You’ve been had! That was exactly the case history of Koko the gorilla. It’s a classic developmental milestone in behavioral research. Christ, every psych grad student knows it, chapter and verse.”