Breakpoint

4 Wednesday, March 11

Randall Ackerman carried his Starbucks grande mocha skim latte in his right hand and the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal under his left arm as he bounded into his thirty-third-floor office at Paragon, the hedge fund his father had started eleven years earlier. Now, under Randall, it managed seventeen billion dollars in assets.

“Morning, Asimov,” he said to the silvery doglike robot standing by the window. It barked once in reply. “Let’s begin,” he said to the bot. It was what he said to the machine every morning. The bot barked twice and activated Randall’s office systems. A large flat-panel screen lit up on the wall, stock market data in several windows and a cable news channel in another. The overhead lights glowed on. The bot had cost him twenty-five thousand dollars and he thought that every penny was well spent. This fourth generation bot dog was not a toy. It was his assistant. “Book a table at the Four Seasons for four people at one,” he said to Asimov.

Asimov was also a symbol of Randall’s own success. Only the most technologically savvy and financially prosperous had a canine assistant, or as the Kiasanjay company called them, Cassys. In the thirteen months they had been on the market, only thirty thousand had sold. Nine thousand of them were in Manhattan, Stamford, and Greenwich.

Randall Ackerman spread the papers out on the glass table that served as his desk. “Asimov, ask Bartlett to join me.”

The Cassy turned toward its master. And growled. It was a low, guttural sound that was used to warn off trespassers. “Who’s there, Asimov?” Ackerman asked, looking up from the papers. “What’s wrong, boy?”

The dog barked and leaped up onto the coffee table, scattering the magazines. It barked twice more and then leaped the three feet from the coffee table up onto the surface of the glass desk, hitting the cup of grande mocha skim latte, which emptied its hot liquid onto Randall’s shirt and lap. “Ahhhh! What the fuck! Asimov!” Randall jumped up. “Asimov, system off! Off!”

The dog bot was growling again, at its master. “Asimov, shut down!” Randall screamed. The dog did not comply. “Damn it, search for: First Law of Robotics!”

The canine’s simulated human voice annunciator switched on: “Search results: Data set not found.” Asimov stepped back to the corner of the glass-topped desk and barked loudly three times. It then ran the length of the table and leaped into the air, toward, then through the plate-glass window, shattering the glass as it shot itself into the air thirty-three stories above Madison Avenue. Then Asimov, and pieces of glass, fell to the street and sidewalk below.

Stunned, horrified, Randall Ackerman moved slowly to the window, suppressing his fear of heights. He felt a blast of cold air shooting through the hole in the glass. As he looked down Madison Avenue, he saw a window break in the building across Fifty-seventh Street. Another Cassy shot out of that window and arced out over Madison Avenue. He watched, incredulous, as the silvery dog bot smashed into a yellow taxi below, shattering the advertising screen on its roof.

“Asimov!” Randall called out. Then, “Bartlett!” No one answered. He patted his coat, found his PDA, and then hit the speed dial for his lawyer.

“It’s so big that clouds form and it rains inside,” the Space Agency guard said to Susan while he was waiting for her name on the facility’s guest access list of his computer screen. “They built it to house blimps when this was a Navy air station. Then NASA took over for the Ames Research Center; now Google rents a big chunk of the base for the Googleplex. You’re going to the Stanford-Carnegie Advanced Informatics Facility, SCAIF. Turn right and it’s all the way down at the end of the road. Big building, no windows. Have a good one,” he said, handing over a badge for her and a Visitor sign for the dashboard of her rented Nissan battery car.

SCAIF, a joint operation of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University and California’s Stanford University, was one of three American supercomputer hubs that were to be part of Globegrid. Another one, CAIN, in Cambridge, had blown up. The fiber-optic connections needed to link them to their counterparts in Europe and Japan had also blown up, or at least the U.S. ends of the fiber had. Susan expected security here to be heightened, but the NASA police guarding the campus seemed relaxed. In addition to the guard at the gate, there had been a NASA police car inside the perimeter. She wondered about the NASA police. They were probably like the National Zoo police, the Library of Congress police, the Washington Aqueduct police, and the twenty-one other federal police agencies she had counted in the nation’s capital. Now, as she approached SCAIF, she saw another NASA patrol car parked prominently outside the building, in front of a row of concrete Jersey barriers. Not enough to stop somebody serious, Susan thought as she walked in.

Susan had taken the first flight out from Logan to San Francisco, and as she finally got to her destination at SCAIF, she remembered what its twin facility in Cambridge looked like as a burned-out hulk. Walking into the California computer center, she wondered exactly what her office had said to get her the appointment on such short notice.

“I’m Dr. Walter Heintel, deputy director at SCAIF,” the tall, bald man said, thrusting out a hand awkwardly. “Our director, Dr. Stanley Goldberg, can’t be with you today, budget meeting up the road at Stanford, but he said to tell you anything, show you anything you want. You must be with the National Science Foundation?”

“No, but I am with another research arm of the federal government, the IAC,” she said, quickly flashing her credentials. “I was hoping you could tell me more about Living Software and Globegrid, and also the Human Brain Reverse-Engineering Project.”

They sat in a small, dimly lit conference room inside SCAIF. The left wall was glass, and through it Susan could see what she assumed the inside of a laptop would look like through a microscope. Blue lights glowed and blinked down identical, three-story-high stacks of gray boxes. She counted twelve rows, each perhaps as long as half a football field. Catwalks wove among the machines, as did bundles of orange cables. She saw no humans.

“Well, where to begin?” The professor looked away, as if to see the answer on the other wall. “Stanley, Dr. Goldberg, has really been the man on Living Software since the Cyber Crash, but simply put, once we go live with Globegrid, we will propagate Living Software into any network that opens itself up to receive it. So, LS will determine the task being done by existing software and it will create new, alternative, glitch-free, efficient, secure software to do the routing and to run the servers. The new software will then run on a test bed, and if the network operators like it, they can buy it for a nominal amount that will be paid to the manufacturer of the old software and to Globegrid. We have had self-modifying code for years in worms, but this new code is for a good purpose. Of course, privacy and security rules will mean that sensitive information cannot leave a network. Living Software won’t export anything from the networks it fixes and rewrites, just diagnostic data about itself.”

“Any idea who would want to stop it? China? Russia? Iran?” Susan asked.

“Maybe bad software manufacturers? No, just kidding.” Heintel laughed nervously. “We are dreadfully sorry about CAIN and everything that has happened this week, but Stan is still planning to go live with Globegrid and Living Software by the end of the month. We had hoped that all six computer centers would be linked to save computing time and to ensure that we produced the same result to the same problem everywhere, but we think we can use the two U.S. centers, here and San Diego, with a smaller facility in Pittsburgh, and then we can fly copies of the memory to Japan and Europe every few days and we will sync every five days or so.”

“Who knows you’re still going ahead?” Susan asked.

“People at all the remaining five centers and in Pittsburgh. Only about a thousand or so staff of the Globegrid project. We don’t want to announce it until we are sure we can do it and we have a specific date. It will probably be March twentieth.”

Susan sat silently for a moment, then asked, “Have you personally read and understood the code for the new Living Software?”

“Pieces of it. No one individual has read all of it. My dear, no one person has read all of any operating system for years. Too many lines of code, seventy million lines in most operating systems,” Heintel shrugged, “and eventually what LS writes will get too complex to read and understand with the naked eye anyway. You’ll need a reader application as it evolves.”

“Software to read software. I get it — why not, since software is writing software?” Susan said aloud, but apparently to herself.

“So. Can I tell you about the Human Brain Reverse-Engineering Project — that’s my baby,” Heintel volunteered. He flashed images on the large screen that was the wall at the front of the room. “We just completed the project last November. It’s so exciting, I’m sure you saw all the press about it. It’s like when they finished decoding the human genome and, who knows, maybe as important, or almost. We know now what every part of the brain does and how. We can implant electronics in the ear, eye, and elsewhere directly into the brain, and send signals that are converted to the biochemical language of the brain. And we can go the other way now, taking biochemical signals for memory and turning them into ones and zeroes for copying and storing in silicon, in electronic computers. So, phase two will involve nanotechnology inserts, but we need another five years before we can test that in humans.”

Susan was embarrassed; she had really not noticed all the media coverage of the brain project last November. She had been on a vacation hiking through New Zealand with her boyfriend, Sam who had just accepted a job at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Rusty Macintyre had ordered her to take a month off, and she and Sam had camped, fished, and sailed for three weeks. Then Sam had gone went back to surgery and she to IAC. Last month, they’d been together all of three nights. In Baltimore.

“And exactly how would the Globegrid help?” Susan asked.

“Well, it will give us the computing power and the software to accelerate the research into the nano program and other things we have not really cracked yet, like the consciousness problem, connectivity, other things…” Heintel almost mumbled.

“The consciousness problem?” Susan asked.

“Yes, you see we have successfully downloaded the short-term and long term memories of almost three hundred human subjects. We can send sensor inputs like what their brains receive to a processor, but we haven’t really been able yet to get a computer to take those inputs and, well, puts them all together. We need to develop an application or program that is the master control, something like human consciousness. We can’t find a single place in the human brain that is the locus for consciousness.”

Susan didn’t know whether to be disappointed or reassured. “And the connectivity problem?”

“So, there we are in better shape.” Heintel beamed. “My own work is in this area. We have built converters that will take a series of standard Internet Protocol — formatted packets of data and convert it to the appropriate biochemical-electrical message that the brain will understand and process, and vice versa. Add a WiFi transceiver connected to the internet and you could literally think an e-mail message, see it on your visor, and send it, or think a Google search and then see the results by using wraparound visualization glasses. The Google guys down the street love it.”

“You’re serious?” Susan breathed.

“I know, and it was only what, just eight years ago that we first used the thoughts of paralyzed patients to move computer mouses and keyboards? Then we had the little brain-connected appliances that stopped depression and the like.” Sensing Susan’s apparent concern, he added, “Of course, no one will be connected directly to the internet for a while. The subjects we have will be tied into a closed, firewalled sub-network on Globegrid, but the subjects will be able to search some files and send each other text messages. And Living Software can learn from what they, the humans, see and do. That way, Living Software will make the big step from artificial intelligence — using rule-based theory — to sentience. I just can’t wait to start.”

“When?”

“Realistically, probably not until May,” Heintel said, and sighed.

“Of this year?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” The professor beamed, “As soon as we get the Globegrid work-around up for a while. Soon. So, can you help us with our funding shortfall?”

Susan Connor sat quietly in the rental car, forcing her own gray-matter processor to sift through what she had just been told. Living Software, an operating system itself written by software, would pretty soon offer to install itself on every network in the world. Most network operators would accept it. Even though the Globegrid computers were not now all linked in real time, they would still coordinate their files every five days, comparing and conforming the programs that Living Software had written and installed everywhere. There would no doubt be diagnostic applications left behind everywhere to monitor how the software was doing and report back to the LS master program on the Globegrid processors. And Living Software would, as its name implied, continue to live and grow, changing itself and its offspring to meet new security threats and problems.

Across the parking lot, Susan noticed that a surveillance camera on the streetlight had just turned in her direction. At least the fearsome NASA police had installed security cameras.

She had heard of Living Software for three or four years now, but this was the first time the implications were sinking in. It was more than just glitch-free programs, a lot more. And soon some human brains would be connected to a computer network on which Living Software was running. The human interface would be firewalled off, of course, on a sub-net. Right. Megs was right, there was a lot of technology that was about to be sprung on an unsuspecting world. And that was just what was in the open. What about the technology developments that were hidden? How ironic that the Chinese and others knew about the underground research and development, but Washington did not. She had to find the full extent of it, before it, too, was attacked and set back or destroyed. Megs had pointed her in the right direction, but now she needed more help to uncover the partially hidden new world of computer science and genomics, of nano and quantum computing, of reverse-engineering the human brain.

She thumbed through her notes on the PDA, went online to get the number for Jupiter Systems, and connected through to the main number in Menlo Park, five miles away. “Could you put me through to the office of Will Gaudium, please?” Mr. Gaudium, a founder of the information systems giant, was no longer full time in Menlo Park, Susan was told, but she could send an e-mail to his assistant who would consider her request for a meeting. Susan dashed off a message explaining not just that she was a Fed who wanted to interview him on a matter of national security, but also that she wanted his help understanding the security implications of Living Software and the Human Brain Reverse-Engineering Project.

As she drove away from SCAIF back to the main gate, she was distracted, her mind still in a fog, trying to understand what was spinning around her and why she had not seen it before. And why no one else on this case apparently got it yet. She needed to talk to Jimmy, get his reaction…. And then it happened. In her peripheral vision, she caught a flash up ahead, then heard the sound of a thud. At the end of the road, near the gate, over a half mile away, a cloud of dust billowed up, and shooting out of the dust cloud came a truck, a red eighteen-wheeler tractor-trailer, coming fast down the road right toward her.

Suddenly she knew. No processing time was required. The situational understanding was instant. The gatehouse had just been attacked and now SCAIF was about to go the way of CAIN and the beachheads. Where the hell were Jimmy and his guns when she needed them? The truck was probably one giant bomb.

Without stopping for second thoughts, Susan threw the car into park, pulled the belt off her bag, and strapped it around the steering wheel and the seat-belt hook. Then, aiming the car for where the truck would be in a few seconds as it came around the curve, she pushed open the driver’s door, threw the gear into drive, set the cruise control for seventy, and leapt from the car as it sped up. Hitting the grass hard, she rolled, and then, her back facing the road, she assumed the fetal position and waited.

And…nothing happened.

Nothing. If the car had missed colliding with the eighteen wheeler, at least the truck should be roaring by her…

The ground shook below her as though a dinosaur had put its foot down next to her. Then the concussive wave pounded her everywhere on her body, like she was being punched by ten men. As the sound overloaded her brain, she was simultaneously aware of pieces of flaming metal landing all around her, setting the grass on fire. It had worked, she thought as the air rushed out of her lungs and she passed out.

The impact of the Nissan hitting the charging truck had set off the detonator. The truck bomb had gone off on the approach road, blowing out windows across the campus, sending a column of smoke and debris thousands of feet in the air, causing a crater thirty feet wide and eight feet deep, throwing the chassis of the truck cab over the fence and off the base. The person or people inside the truck cab would never be found, except for microscopic pieces of flesh that would be analyzed for their DNA signatures.

Inside the windowless SCAIF, the earthquake shock absorbers had adjusted instantly when the blast occurred. The rows of parallel processors did not miss a byte. They continued to hum and to glow blue.

“Sol, I thought I would just check in before I go home,” Sir Dennis Penning-Smith said into the secure telephone in his London office. “We’ve seen media reports of a terrorist attack near the Googleplex.”

“You’re working too late for a man of your age, Sir Dennis,” Rubenstein teased his old friend.

“As I recall, Sol, you are four months older,” Sir Dennis replied gravely.

“Yes, but it’s five hours earlier here.” Rubenstein got down to business. “Yes, we are still getting details on the explosion, but the most important thing is that one of our officers was there and was apparently responsible for preventing the attack from getting to Google or the university research center. That center was linked to Globegrid and was probably the target. Don’t know yet who did it, of course.”

The voice link was traveling over a military satellite channel, and during the brief pause in their conversation they could both hear the subtle sounds of its transmission and encryption. “So it continues,” Sir Dennis intoned. “Sol, our Beijing station thinks that there is some sort of internal tension in the Chinese leadership. We have a source there who is in a position to know, has access. The source, however, won’t give up his subsource, who we think is pretty highly placed. The subsource says he will only meet with a senior official of our Secret Intelligence Service.”

“Could be a lure,” Rubenstein cautioned.

“Funny, that’s what Brian Douglas said.”

“So let me guess. The Deputy Director of SIS decided to assign himself the task,” Rubenstein replied.

“Of course. Brian lands in Beijing about now,” Sir Dennis said, looking at the antique clock on the fireplace mantel. “He knows how to sense a setup, how to arrange a meet so he can get out.”

“Indeed, he proved that in Tehran, but I doubt he speaks Mandarin and he is a few years older now than when he did the Iran mission.”

“Aren’t we all?” Sir Dennis said, standing up and looking out at the evening traffic coming down from Trafalgar Square and passing below his window on Whitehall toward Parliament. “Sol, the media is full of speculation and leaks that China might be behind the attacks. Senators talking about the need to respond. I hope your President is not feeling the need to—”

“The President is ensuring we are prepared, that we have a spectrum of options if the evidence goes where you and I think it will.” Sol’s view from his Executive Office Building suite looked south from the White House complex across the park toward Reagan National Airport. Aircraft taking off veered sharply to avoid the no fly zone over the White House. The huge spotlights were just coming on at the Washington Monument. “My job — no, Dennis, our job — is not just to come up with the evidence, but it is then to tell our political masters how to handle it without making a complete mess of things.”

Sir Dennis reached for his battered Peterson pipe. “Or to help the Chinese to figure out how to undo what someone in their government may have done. So bloody minded of them about Taiwan, willing to sacrifice their own economic progress to reclaim something they haven’t had in sixty years. The deal they struck with us on Hong Kong worked out nicely. It’s still independent for all practical purposes, a Special Autonomous Region.”

“I agree. What kind of capitalists are these Chinese, anyway?” Rubenstein joked.

“Indeed.”

Soxster sat in a room lit by the light from seven flat screens. He was in the Dugout, a computer facility more capable than those run by most information technology companies. The Dugout, however, had been built with devices found in dumpsters in parking lots behind information technology companies — castoffs rebuilt and improved by Soxster, Greenmonsta, Yankeehater, Fenwayfranks, and the rest of the hacker gang that rented the space in the old shoe factory. They all had day jobs at universities and high-tech corporations in the Boston area. By night, they got to their passion, exploring cyberspace, its dark recesses, its faulty glitched-up networks, its unprotected systems around the world.

“When we find an app, a program, that has a glitch, we tell the right people,” Soxster had assured Jimmy Foley. He hadn’t said how fast they did the notification.

The first to arrive at the Dugout that afternoon, Soxster had tried to track down Susan and Jimmy. Now that he had succeeded in finding Susan, he was sending a text message to Jimmy.

Jimmy Foley had just pulled into a roadside rest stop in the California desert, to empty his bruised kidneys. When he had found out that he could rent a Harley Heritage Softail near LAX airport, he had leapt at the chance. The bike had a fat front fork like the classic 1949 Hydra Glide, and was made to look original right down to the Fat Bob fuel tank. Now, with most of southern California behind him, he was thinking maybe he should have gone for the car that the office had reserved for him. He felt his PDA vibrate and flipped it open to read the text messages.

A cue ball smashed against racked balls as Jimmy walked into the dingy poolroom side of the Marine hangout. He scanned the few people in the room, looking for someone who would fit the description Soxster had just sent him. There were no matches. “Gimme a Bud, will yah. I’ll be right out. Gotta wash some road off me,” Jimmy Foley called out to the young blond bartender. As he strode by her on his way to the men’s room, he judged from the diamond on her finger that she was a Marine’s wife. Despite the motorcycle helmet and gloves, the dust and grime from the highway had made it through to his hands, face, and short cropped hair. He made an attempt to clean up, although the word clean was not what came to mind in the smelly men’s room. Nonetheless, the cold water felt bracing on his face. He put his face in the sink and let the water run over his head. He flashed back to too many nights as Lt. James X. Foley III in Marine bars around the world.

After he toweled dry with the coarse, brown paper towels, he walked into the toilet stall and withdrew the Sig from under his biker jacket. It had no safety. He cocked it to put a round into the chamber and then thumbed the decocking lever. As he reentered the poolroom, Jimmy noticed a young man standing at the bar with two poured glasses of beer. He matched the description of TTeeLer. “Hey, didn’t you use to hang out at the Dugout?” Jimmy said as he walked up to the bar.

“Long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away. Or at least until they kicked me out,” TTeeLer shot back, turning to view the room behind him. He did not offer to shake hands.

Jimmy nodded to the bartender. “Bag of pretzels.” Then he pointed to a table in the corner, away from the door. “Let’s sit down.”

Opening the pretzel bag onto the table, Jimmy did his ingratiating teenager look over at the bartender. As he did, he said softly to TTeeLer, “My name is Jimmy. I am an armed police officer here on federal business. I can get you out of here safely, but we’ll want to talk with you once we get somewhere secure.”

“We can talk here if you’re not recording this. But if you’re wearing a wire, forget it. I am not incriminating myself,” TTeeLer insisted.

“Calm down. Talk quieter. No, I am not wearing a wire. I am here to get you out, safely.”

TTeeLer shook his head, “Not tonight. In the morning. I have to spend the night with Naomi. She’s this single mother in the apartment next to mine. I want her and the kid to follow me out of this shithole town. And I have a lot to explain to her tonight.”

Jimmy watched two off-duty Marines playing pool. “It’s not safe to go back there if someone has made you while you have been out of the building. This is a small town.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” TTeeLer said, hanging his head down. “But I think the goons probably stopped looking for me in town. Last thing they think I’d do is stay here.”

“Okay, so let’s talk. Who are they?” Jimmy asked.

“I don’t know who the big guys are. I just see the local staff. Mainly Americans. Goons for security and some cyber-savvy crooks, who get instructions and ideas from some off-planet being, L.A., Moscow, I don’t know where. A higher intelligence than them, anyway.” TTeeLer was very stressed out and twitchy. His dark blond hair was stringy. Jimmy took him to be about twenty-two, maybe a few years older.

Jimmy put his head in his left hand, obscuring his mouth to anyone looking at him. With his right, he felt for the Sig on his waist and he kept an eye on the door. “So let’s start with the money. What did they have you do to raise money?”

“Usual, at first. Phishing messages for bank accounts and credit cards. Then we forgot about the banks and hacked into the credit-card clearing companies, pick up a couple of hundred thousand names, card numbers, socials. Big bucks. Then we started dropping this app, Ethercap, onto cable TV and DSL systems in wealthy neighborhoods. Remotely, of course. Cable or DSL, they’re nothing more than a local area ethernet. Then we’d pick up every e-mail, every web page anybody on the street saw or sent. Some kinky stuff, but also big online stock-trading accounts. Easy to pick off their passwords with a keystroke logger. Open a bank account in the Caribbean. Sell the stock, bank transfer the money out. Easy pickings.”

Jimmy kept smiling.

“Then we hit on this sweet deal with the music sharing systems, peer-to-peer. Turns out in every company, some idiot has downloaded music sharing software. You just go online and instead of searching for ‘Beatles Greatest Hits,’ you type in ‘Merger Plans’ or ‘New Product Plans’ or ‘Personnel Files’ and you get the company’s secrets right through their firewall.” At that thought, TTeeLer smiled.

“All of which you then sell on the Net,” Jimmy mumbled. “Soxster said something about infrastructure? What’s that all about?”

“That’s where it all started to get all weird. They were having us hack into the power company and shit. Map the network. Leave a trapdoor to get back in easy. SCADA systems. Railroads, pipeline companies, Army bases. I couldn’t see the money in it, but hey, they still paid me the big bucks, some in cash and some in direct deposit. Deposits came from a bank in Kuwait.”

Jimmy sipped slowly at the beer, not wanting to have to go back to the bar or ask the bartender to come to the table. “But that’s not why you left, went AWOL.”

“Not AWOL, I quit. I just didn’t tell them I quit, because my guess is that it’s the Hotel California, you can never leave.” More off-duty Marines came into the room and got cue sticks and beers. “No, I left when I heard them talking about needing to hack in somewhere to change the formula on something. He said, ‘It’ll kill ’em all, hundreds, maybe thousands.’ Listen, whatever your real name is, Jimmy, I will steal from you in cyberspace if you are stupid enough to let me, but I am no killer. Nobody’s giving me the needle in some state pen. So I waited for the next cash disbursement and left the reservation a week later.”

A Marine had started to hit on the bartender and was now getting yelled at by about three others, confirming Foley’s suspicion that her husband was in the Corps. Things looked like they would settle down peacefully. “Where is the reservation?”

“Near town, not far, but outside. I got out by hopping in the back of a delivery van. Hopped out at his next stop about twenty minutes later and I was in town. They never let us go into town since the day we showed up out here. But the reservation is big. Lots of buildings, satellite dishes, runway. Shit, man, they even had little UAVs, RPVs, you know, planes without pilots. And a lotta guns.”

Jimmy was using his detective training in interrogation. Just let the subject talk. Do not make a big deal out of what you want to know, pick it up in pieces, come back to it. “So the formula they’re going to change so that a bunch of people die. Any idea—”

TTeeLer hit the table with his fist. “Man, I have racked my brain. I mean, the whole reason I hung around for a week after I got my cash was just to see if I could find out what shit they’re planning, but I got nothing. And I think some of them were getting suspicious of me askin’ about things.”

“Ever see any Chinese? Russians? Arabs?” Jimmy queried.

“Russians, yeah, but only a few at our place. But I’m sure there are other places, doing other shit. We were just here because they were really interested in what was going on at the base, but they wouldn’t let me in on that shit. Enough for tonight, man. I’ll tell you more when I get the written deal, the no prosecution deal. Tomorrow.”

Jimmy tried to think if he had offered him that. “Sure. Tomorrow. When and where?”

TTeeLer looked around the pool hall. “There’s a 7-Eleven near Amboy and Adobe. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning. There’ll be three of us, including a kid who’s four. And bring some help, buddy, just in case.” Jimmy Foley watched for any reactions in the room as TTeeLer walked toward the back of the hall, then ducked through the kitchen door. At least, Jimmy thought, the kid was smart enough not to walk out the front door, but not smart enough to stay out of trouble.

Almost a half hour later, Jimmy looked up from his PDA to see Dr. Mark Rathstein coming toward him. “Foley, sorry I’m late.” He was trim, in a blue polo shirt and khakis, with graying hair and glasses. “Good to see you. Long time. You look great. Welcome to Twentynine stumps.”

“Dr. Rathstein, didn’t expect you would want to meet in a pool hall,” Jimmy said, thrusting a hand out. Mark Rathstein, he knew from his Marine days, was a Navy doctor who also had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering.

“I come here to work when I want to get away from the office,” the doctor said, and then yelled to the bartender, “Two Coors Lights.”

“When I saw you were coming, I checked that it was you, then got myself assigned as your host,” Rathstein said. “You left NYPD?”

“No, Doc, just got assigned down in D.C. to work with the spooks for a year, to learn how Feds think. Think of it as field research. Supposed to increase my chance for promotion. Great to see you, too, and thanks for volunteering to show me around. So, what is this place out here in the middle of nowhere?”

The doctor waited while the waitress deposited two cold mugs of Coors and a bowl of popcorn. “How’s your dad doing? Great guy. Did he retire yet, or is he still doing law at seventy-plus?”

Jimmy winced. “Thanks for asking. Yeah, Dad retired. Had to. Fast-onset Alzheimer’s. They can’t do anything for him. He’s in a home near my brother’s on Long Island.”

“Sorry, Jim. My mother went that way,” Rathstein whispered. He took a small sip of froth and beer. “So you asked to see the base here? Marine desert training base. Amazing you never got stuck here before going to Iraq. What we’re doing at the hospital is an extension of what we did a few years ago in Bethesda. Back then we were giving Marines from Iraq new arms and legs, lightweight, electronic, tied directly to the brain. Now we’re giving them new arms and legs before they’ve lost the ones they were born with, so they don’t get shot up in the first place.”

Jimmy leaned across the table. “Doc, listen, as a jarhead, we all owe you guys a world of thanks. The body armor in Iraq saved lives by protecting our trunks, but not our limbs. We had more guys lose limbs and live than in any war before. Thousands. What you guys at Bethesda did with your gizmos was make those lives worth living.” Jimmy toasted him, clinking his mug against the doctor’s. “How’s this new stuff work?”

Dr. Rathstein beamed, excited to share the story of his work. “Think spacesuit. Not just Kevlar plates here and there, but the entire body is inside a suit that is heated and air conditioned. The suit monitors body functions and reports problems, fixes some of them by itself with medication patches and injections. There’s liquid nutrition supplied. And, of course, the whole thing is bullet-and flame-resistant and Netcentric, connected with an internet address.”

“Bullet resistant ain’t bulletproof,” Jimmy said while dripping yellow mustard on a pretzel. “Sounds like a heavy load to be luggin’ ’round on top of all the weapons and shit they have to carry.”

“That’s the whole point!” Rathstein chuckled. “All of their limbs are server motor — assisted. They can run faster than a sprinter, throw a ball farther than the best quarterback, jump higher than a track-and-field star. The exoskeleton suit lets them carry over a hundred and twenty pounds of additional equipment on outside hooks with little or no effect on speed or motion. A few battalions of them could beat any army in the world.”

Foley put down his beer mug and stared at the doctor. “Shit. We’re talking Imperial storm troopers, like in Star Wars, with the helmets and all?”

“Sort of. The suits come in green or desert camouflage, not bright white like in the movies. Yes, they have helmets, with air filtration and built-in radios, intranet connectivity that you can see using a visor that also does night vision and telescopic. The listening system has ‘dog ear’ parabolics. And you literally have eyes in the back of your head, because there’s a camera in the rear of the helmet that allows you to see what’s behind you.” This time Rathstein took a gulp of beer. “Don’t you want to ask if you can take a leak?”

Jimmy laughed. “I assumed you could do that. You probably recycle it into Gatorade so the gyrenes don’t short circuit your spacesuits. What I was puzzling out was how you could take a dump.”

“That is still a problem, I admit,” the doctor said in a more subdued manner. “But with liquid nutrition and certain medications, the intervals when that becomes necessary can be extended to seventy-two hours or so, for now.”

Jimmy almost choked on his mouthful of beer. “That’s great, Doc, now the Army guys will be right when they say us jarheads are all full of shit.”

“No, no. The Army has a similar suit under test at Fort Irwin over by Barstow. Ours is better,” Rathstein said, his finger jabbing at the air. “And we have two companies here wearing them in field conditions. They have only one company. We’ve been in full suit for weeklong operations, with several changes of batteries, of course. They’ve only gone three days at a time in the suit. Tonight we’re going to prove ours is better in a head on test. We’re playing them in baseball. And you have a seat on the first-base line.”

They drove onto the base in Dr. Rathstein’s hydrogen-cell Chevy Suburban. He had a visitor’s pass ready for Foley. A few minutes inside the sprawling base, they came to a halt before a sand dune and got out. The sun had just set and there was still pale orange light in the west, reflecting off the few clouds on the horizon. In the east the sky was already black and the stars were brightening. Jimmy remembered now how cold it could get in the desert on a winter’s night. And how quiet it could be.

“What’s here?” Jimmy asked as they walked toward the dune.

“The baseball game,” Rathstein said, as though it were obvious. “The Marine Superskels against the Army Spacetroopers.” He continued to walk up the dune.

At the top of the dune, Foley looked down into the shadows. He made out a few tables on the left with people sitting at them, and a single bench with four people on the right. They appeared to be watching something, but there was nothing to see. He blinked and stared out as far as possible. In the dusk, in the distance, he made out what might be a man standing in the sand. Then he heard a sharp ping, the sound of a ball hitting a metal baseball bat.

“Let’s go get helmets so we can see the game,” Rathstein said as he jogged down the slope.

Fitted with a sand-colored, oversized football helmet, Foley was given a quick tutorial in its use. The visor had a night-vision device. A projection that appeared to float in front of him showed statistics on the game, like a Fox Box. It also showed real-time statistics, how far the ball had been hit and where, how far the fielder had thrown it and how fast. The Army was up by three in the bottom of the fourth. The Marines’ left fielder had just caught a ball and then thrown straight to the plate to get the third out by stopping the runner from first. He had thrown 2,408 feet, from somewhere out in the darkening desert. There were no lights on the field, but with the visor Jimmy could see players scattered over a great distance bounding across the sand the way Neil Armstrong had jump-walked on the moon. Each of their jumping strides took them almost eight feet into the air and landed them in sand almost twenty feet ahead.

As the flying teams changed sides for the top of the fifth inning, a man wearing a tan tracksuit came over to the bench. He was not wearing a helmet, sporting instead a set of dark, wraparound sunglasses. “Mark, I assume this is our guest, Detective Foley? I’m Bill Chin, DARPA project director at the Palms. We thought you’d like to see our project in action before you meet with the security guys in the morning. Enjoying the game?”

“I’m not sure Major League Baseball has anything to worry about yet. No city could build a park big enough for these guys,” Jimmy joked. “There’s definitely not enough open room in the Bronx.”

“I don’t think what our troops are wearing will be the style for the New York Yankees anytime soon. The game is just a way to let the guys get used to their combat suits. And a little PR for the Pentagon brass to show at the next appropriations hearing,” Chin said, sitting down next to Foley on the bench. Chin held his right arm out and felt his own tracksuit with a gloved left hand. “This tracksuit will be all the rage in Manhattan in two years. The civilian suit. Doesn’t stop bullets, but it does everything else the combat suit does. And it comes with a fly and back flap. Wall Street will love it. The glasses could give you a full Bloomberg board projected out front. You can wear a flexible keyboard or tabloid on your arm or just speak the computer instructions into your mouthpiece, or as I like to call it, your Chin piece.”

He demonstrated unfolding a flexible tabloid computer screen from the tracksuit’s right arm. “And when you’re getting too excited about your day trading, your onboard cardiologist program calls to tell you that your vitals are elevated.”

Jimmy played with the flexitab computer for a few seconds. “Why not just have the suit give you CPR?”

“Oh, it could. It could also give you a sedative and call for an ambulance, since it knows exactly where you are on the enhanced GPS grid,” Dr. Rathstein added.

“The reality is, Mr. Foley, that everyone who will have one of these suits will be as close to Superman as we are going to become until we build some sort of comic-book antigravity device someday,” Chin replied. “The standard medicine kit can keep you awake for seventy-two hours with no side effects. You could lift a small car with one arm. You don’t have X-ray vision, but you do have telescopic and night vision. You’re directly wired to the internet, so all the knowledge in the world is instantly available to you and you can talk, chat, text, or e-mail anyone anywhere. You are part of the connected consciousness.”

Foley, who had taken off his helmet, looked at Chin in the dark. “So how much will it be at Macy’s menswear?”

“I bet we could get it down to a little more than one hundred K a suit in two years,” Chin said and smiled.

“If you’re taking orders, I’m a forty-four long,” Jimmy shot back, “but I think I’ll need a pay raise. At that price, not many folks will be including that in their 2014 fall wardrobes.”

“No, not many,” Rathstein chimed in, “but then, in the comic books there was only one Superman and we’re talking about there being tens of thousands of supermen.”

“Sounds great.” Jimmy got up to watch the game better. “Unless you’re one of the other ten billion people on Earth.”

“Why did the SCAIF attack fail?” The man they called “the General” sat in the chair by the fireplace. The lights in the room were off.

“They made it through the main gate at Moffet as planned. The two in the lead car took out the gatehouse and the police car with grenades, and then the truck pulled through. The truck got halfway down the road toward the computer lab, but then it blew up,” the Asian man answered. “The guys in the lead car didn’t stay around to find out why.” He heard logs collapsing in the hearth as the fire burned through them. He heard the General exhale, a long breath, through his nose.

“It failed because we have to use these amateurs, because we recruit under false flags,” the General said as he stood to tend to the fire, “because we seek to do this all with few casualties. Minimize collateral damage. Nonsense.” He tamped down the crumbling logs with a poker. “Specifically, it failed because that black woman drove a car into the side of the trailer and that set off the bomb prematurely. I had an observer there.” He placed another log on the embers.

The Asian man was disturbed that the General knew more than he did about why the attack had failed. There was something, however, that he was sure the general did not know yet. “The two in the lead car are safe. They changed cars and drove down the Pacific Coast Highway to Carmel. They’re holed up in a cabin at a small hotel there. Waiting until things calm down. Waiting for their next assignment.”

The General reseated himself. “At least the dog attacks worked. Maybe they’ll realize now that those dogs had ears all this time. Such good stock tips. Well, the internet and cyberspace has been hit. Now we have gone after their robotics. Even this crowd in the White House will be able to figure out that their technology is under attack.”

The Asian man stood silently, thinking about the failed truck bomb. Finally, he spoke: “If I may ask, who was the observer you had at SCAIF?”

“The observer? The observer is a man who eliminated two people in a cabin at a small hotel in Carmel a short while ago.”