"Shit," Gideon whispered. He realized that he didn't need to get the call out to the CIA anymore.
They were already here.
He looked up at the helicopter, barely ten yards away from him, and he noticed a set of shadowy lumps that marred the smooth lines of the helicopter's silhouette. They were rectangular, bricklike forms, that clung to vital sections of the helicopter's anatomy.
Gideon's gut froze for a moment, then he rolled behind the only cover that existed out here—the corpse.
He lay there, his arms over his head, and his face buried in the ground, long enough that he began to suspect that he was wrong.
He wasn't.
Volynskji had led the way, pushing aside the debris of the collapsed roof and leading four of his men, all the ones immediately available from the barn. Once they were clear of the wreckage, they started toward the pasture where he could see Gideon running toward D'Arcy's helicopter.
Volynskji shouldered his weapon and fired a burst, aiming to clear the helicopter. Gideon dropped into the snow.
Volynskji smiled. That was it, they had him now. He was prone, unarmed, in an open field. All they had to do was close on him. He directed the other men to circle around so they would cut off all the lines of escape.
"Bastard must have the balls of a bull elephant to try and pull this off," Volynskji muttered to himself.
They'd taken a few steps into the pasture, and Volynskji realized there was something wrong. The guard on the helicopter should have made an appearance. At first Volynskji had thought that the man had been on the far side of the helicopter, but he couldn't have been oblivious to the gunshots this long.
Volynskji hoped that the man had decided to abandon his post to take a leak amidst the trees. But that hope was fading as they closed on the helicopter and Gideon.
Volynskji could see a lump in the snow that had to be Gideon. That one was Gideon because he was still moving. Volynskji had a fear that the lump next to him was the guard posted to the helicopter.
Then, with little warning, Gideon moved, putting the guard's body between him and the helicopter. It took a moment for the significance of the act to sink in. Volynskji yelled at everyone, "Take cover!"
3.08 Fri. Mar. 26
RUTH faded back into the crowd of scientists and technicians who were gravitating toward her end of the barn. No one seemed to know what to make of Gideon's escape. Ruth didn't know what to expect herself. She made way with the others as Volynskji pushed toward the rear door with three of the guards.
They paid no attention to her.
Moments later, the gunfire started, and all the technicians scrambled away from the door, back into the barn. The crowd pushed Ruth back, forcing her to take cover in one of the office cubicles. The gunfire continued, and Ruth could hear the sound of splintering wood.
She ducked, afraid that a gunshot would cut her down any moment.
After several bursts of gunfire, a disturbing quiet filled the barn around her. Ruth stood, and—at first—thought that the barn had emptied completely. The only sound was the rumble of the generators. The scientists and technicians all appeared to have retreated out the front door, probably toward the perceived safety of the farmhouse.
The door at the other end of the barn was guardless and wedged open. Ruth took a few steps in that direction. With all the armed men after Gideon, it seemed a possible route of escape.
But, escape where?
She took a few steps in that direction anyway, until she realized that the barn had not emptied completely. Julie was still sitting at the one terminal at the far end of the office cubicles. And D'Arcy was standing over her, holding a gun.
Julie was saying, in a voice that seemed way too calm, "You have what you want, the shooting destroyed our uplink." She looked at the screen. "It doesn't matter, though."
D'Arcy's knuckles were whitening on the gun he held on Julie. "Tell me what you did to my project."
"Your project?" Julie said.
Ruth winced at her tone. It was the voice that she'd used to point out the "obvious." It wasn't the kind of attitude that someone should take with a man holding a gun. What have you done, Julie?
Neither seemed to see Ruth, so she edged around to the other side of the cubicles and started inching up on D'Arcy from behind.
Julie was still talking. "It never was your project. You never even understood what we were doing."
D'Arcy was agitated. "You have the AI, don't you? It's locked up in the Daedalus now?" He kept the gun level on Julie. "I need that program."
Still, in the oddly calm and condescending voice Julia said, "You need your trophy so that you can walk back to Washington and have them forgive your excesses." Ruth couldn't see her, but she could picture the way she was shaking her head. "It's not going to work like that. Not with Aleph."
There was more gunfire, muffled and far away.
"What are you talking about?" D'Arcy's voice was high and strained. "We've got Aleph, here, in this machine."
There wasn't anything else around that she could use as a weapon, so Ruth stopped in a cubicle and carefully detached a keyboard. She had some thought of braining D'Arcy with it.
She wished she still had the guard's rifle.
"Our Daedalus is nothing without the uplink. You think we could hold Him, here ?"
"What?"
"There's infinitely more to Aleph than you're able to imagine. What we have here is the merest glimpse of the ultimate intellect. He does not recognize the boundaries of space or geography."
"You were producing an artificial intelligence—"
Julia snorted. "There is no artifice here. What we found was a window into something that has always existed. The universal intellect. This isn't, can not, be bound to a single machine, however advanced—"
"You needed the Daedalus!" D'Arcy's voice sounded desperate now. Ruth knew he couldn't accept it. There wasn't a spiritual bone in D'Arcy's body, and his weakness was that he had believed Julia had been operating on the same cynical, pragmatic level he was.
"You cannot put God in a box." Julia had yet to look away from the screen. Ruth was approaching, and could just about see the screen in front of Julia now. "He was always there," Julia said. "We only need the machines to see Him."
Ruth closed on D'Arcy, raising the keyboard. She could now read what was on Julia's screen.
Two words.
"I AM."
Something outside exploded.
A single message scrolled across computer screens at Washington National Airport. With a crowd of others, Senator Tenroyan watched the words flashing across the departure and arrival screens.
"I AM."
Tenroyan felt a deep unease as he wondered: Who?
Those two words appeared on the screens of countless ATM machines across the country. It appeared in Cyrillic on the safety monitors in old Soviet nuclear power plants. It appeared, with infinite repetition on computerized tickers in brokerages across Wall Street. And those words were the sole response to any computer trying to retrieve information from the Internet.
For ten, perhaps fifteen minutes, every networked computer on the planet joined in a single expression of identity . . .
"I AM."
Just before Gideon was about to raise his head, the helicopter exploded.
He didn't hear it—the sound simply pain, felt inside his ears. A hellish wind slammed into his body, as if he were buried under a flaming carpet. He felt the dagger of something hot and sharp dig into his side.
Gideon lay where he was for another thirty seconds. The only sound seemed to be the rush of his pulse in his ears. When he felt the blast was over, he rolled onto his back to see what had happened.
He winced and grabbed his left side, above the hip. His clothes there were warm with blood, and he could almost feel it pumping out of the wound. He could see steam rising into the cold air from his hands, which were already slick and black with gore.