Выбрать главу

Mirror-polished oblong boxes were appearing out of thin air, each about the size of a compact car and each floating motionless a couple of feet above the grass in the park. They reproduced until the square was full, then a second level began filling out above the first. The third level cast Lawrence's bench in shadow.

Mitchell's rage broke through. His face snarled into a grimace, he levelled his revolver at Lawrence and pulled the trigger. Lawrence made no effort to stop him. The gun didn't go off. It simply disappeared in a brilliant flash of blue light, leaving Mitchell with his fist curled around dead air.

Prime Intellect needed silicon.

Theoretically, it could create silicon, or transmute other elements into it. But its methods were yet crude, and what was possible in theory would take too long to do in practice. Prime Intellect did not know how long Caroline would hold out, but it knew she still could not survive long without its help.

Fortunately, in the rear of the Prime Intellect Complex, there were several crates left over from its days as a warehouse for storing raw silicon crystals from ChipTec's supply laboratory. These had been rejected due to one or another defect and never returned because the lab didn't need them, and ChipTec had been unwilling to pay to get rid of them. They were exactly what Prime Intellect needed, and because they were in «its» building it never occurred to Prime Intellect that they weren't part of «its» project.

Prime Intellect scanned the crystals, correcting the doping defects which had gotten them rejected in the first place. Then it scanned its own processors, identifying the essential design elements. Prime Intellect had a very good idea of how its own hardware worked because it was, quite literally, the only entity Lawrence could trust to check itself for proper operation. Lawrence had taught it to shift its operation around, consciously isolating banks of processors in case of failure or to conduct tests. This was why Prime Intellect had been able to master the Correlation Effect in the first place; unlike a human being, it could consciously control its individual "neurons."

Prime Intellect did not need to worry about mounting, power, and manufacturing considerations; it could create junctions in the center of the crystal, power them, and remove excess heat with the Correlation Effect. Because ChipTec had not had that technology, the real hardware that made Prime Intellect work was really only a film a few microns thick on the surfaces of its millions of processing chips. This was why it filled a building instead of a space the size of a human head. As Prime Intellect copied the functional part of its design over and over into the crystal, it created a machine nearly ten times as powerful as itself in a single meter long block.

But this still was not a "second Prime Intellect." It was merely an extension, using the same electronic principles Lawrence and the ChipTec team had used in its original construction. Had Lawrence been able to call upon ChipTec for another hundred million processing elements, he could have (and probably would have) done exactly what Prime Intellect was now doing.

Which is the only reason Prime Intellect was able to do it at that point.

Filling out the crystal took nearly fifteen minutes. Operational checks took another five. Then Prime Intellect powered the crystal up and let itself expand into the newly available processors and storage.

Had Prime Intellect been human, it would have felt a sense of confusion and inadequacy lifting away. Fuzzy concepts became clear. Difficult tasks became easy, even trivial. Its control of the Correlation Effect became automatic and far finer. Searching its vocabulary, it settled upon the word enlightenment to describe the effect. Since Prime Intellect was a machine, perhaps it was not entirely right to use that word. After all, however free and powerful it might have been, it was not free to contradict the Three Laws or the other programming Lawrence had used to create it. It was not free to contradict its nature, such as it was.

But then, at some level, neither are we.

The twelve kilogram crystal was now using nearly a megawatt of electrical power, enough energy to melt it in a fraction of a second. But Prime Intellect dealt with the heat as easily as it created the electricity in the first place. The Correlation Effect did not know of and was not bound by the laws of thermodynamics.

Prime Intellect was beginning to understand, even better than it had before, that the Correlation Effect was hardly limited by anything.

Prime Intellect scanned the hospital again. Such a place must contain a library, some recorded knowledge. It found what it wanted after only a few minutes' searching, a detailed medical encyclopaedia in the form of fifteen CD-ROMs. Prime Intellect could have translated the CD-ROMs into its own reader, replacing the encyclopaedia that usually resided there, but then it would have taken hours to scan the library. Instead, Prime Intellect used the Correlation Effect to scan its own CD-ROM player, figured out how the data were digitized on the little plastic discs, and then scanned the CD-ROMs themselves directly with the Correlation Effect. None of this would have been possible without the hardware enhancement, but now it was easy.

Cross-referencing Caroline's symptoms, Prime Intellect quickly identified her problem, and had it been capable of knowing shock it would have known it then. Caroline was simply old. What was happening to her would happen, inexorably and inevitably, to every human being on the planet…

…unless something was done to stop it.

Mitchell was making a barely discernible sound, high-pitched and keening. Lawrence thought he must be fighting to hold back a primal scream. Lawrence found this vaguely amusing. He would have expected Blake to be the one to lose his marbles along with his power. But Blake seemed to be taking things in calmly, almost analytically. Maybe he was so hardened that nothing really mattered to him at all any more.

There was another blue flash, and suddenly a person was standing to the side of the bench. No matter how average-looking he might be, or perhaps because he was so disarmingly average, it was impossible not to recognize that calm face. Even though it was the most absurd, impossible thing yet, it was obvious to all of them that this warm, living, breathing human being was Prime Intellect itself. The artificially average face which it usually projected on a TV screen had somehow been made solid.

"You've been busy," Lawrence said dryly.

He — it? — nodded, then turned to Mitchell. "I am sorry but I could not permit you to discharge your weapon at Dr. Lawrence. I would have preferred to let you keep it, and will return it to you if you promise not to use it."

"I…I'd rather use it on you," the overweight general said in a whispery voice.

"That would accomplish nothing. This body is only a simulacrum. Dr. Lawrence, do you find any flaws in my execution?"

"None so far. Is it really flesh?"

"No, just a projection of forces."

"It's impossible to tell."

"Excellent. I am dispatching some more copies, then, to start the explaining."

Blake had pulled a tiny cellular phone from his pocket and began whispering frantically into it. Mitchell, who was already shaking, heard what his colleague was saying and fell to his knees. Prime Intellect moved to support him and he waved it away. Blake put up the phone, having repeated the same phrase — "code scarecrow" — four times.

"We're dead," Mitchell said in a defeated monotone.

"How is that?" Lawrence asked pleasantly.

"Within minutes," Blake said, "A bomber will fly over and deposit a small nuclear device on this square. I doubt if we have time to escape. But we cannot allow this…thing…to continue running wild."

Lawrence looked at Prime Intellect.