Breakpoint

6 Friday, March 13

He was aware of a humming and then of that feeling in his left arm that meant he had an intravenous feed. He tried to open his eyes and succeeded only in raising his left eyelid. The light coming in through the window was too bright, forcing him to quickly shut the lid.

“You’ve always been a very good patient, Jimmy, and there you are waking on cue from the stimulant.”

He recognized the deep tones of Dr. Mark Rathstein. Without again attempting to open his eyes, Foley tried to talk. His mouth and throat were bone dry. He whispered, “Update me, Doc. What happened?” He felt a plastic straw on his lips and sucked in some water from the bottle Rathstein was holding. “Thanks.”

“It’s been a long night. We got you in here about twelve hours ago. Slight concussion, cuts, but your Mark II personal optic had been shattered by a piece of the metal roof, like a little dagger. Thank the gods it stopped at the back of the optic orb and didn’t keep going into the brain.” Rathstein spoke slowly, calmly. “I replaced the optic with a Mark V. It’s much more capable, but you will have to get used to it once the swelling goes down and you take the dressing off in a few days.”

Foley struggled to speak, coughing and clearing his throat. “Guess if I was goin’ to be stabbed in my superman eye, this was the best place in the world for that to happen. Thank you for…” He coughed again. He remembered now how much he hated the struggle to get rid of anesthesia in his body. It took days last time.

“This time we will have to tell your civilian employer about the eye. There is little chance now that they will seek to disqualify you from your job. The enhanced personal optics have an established track record and you now have the state-of-the-art model. Would have cost you a bundle in the civilian world. I’m writing it off as research here. You’re the first case of an upgrade from the mark two to the mark five.” Rathstein was keeping the discussion to the implant. “You will notice that it has greater telescopic range and clarity, better low-light vision and infrared. The interaction with the brain is the same, through the optic nerve. You can also link directly to a helmet and a visor to do split screen, including from the camera on the back of the helmet, so you literally have eyes in the back of your head. And you can feed what you see through the visor to the Net so that you can let other guys in your squad or back at headquarters see what you see.”

“No X-ray vision yet, Doc?” Jimmy asked, half joking, as he slowly opened his left eye, his human eye, again. “No way to use stem cells to grow me a new eye?”

“Not yet, but we will use stem cells to grow you back a tooth for the one you lost. No X-ray vision yet, either. Haven’t been able to deal with the power problems, although there is a millimeter wave experiment that is interesting,” Rathstein said, offering the water bottle again. “The primary power source for the Mark V is solar. There are nano-photovoltaic cells on the surface of the unit. A secondary power pack for low light conditions is in the same place as the old one, behind your collarbone.”

Foley raised his right hand and felt the bandaging below his neck. “How often does it need to be changed?”

“It doesn’t,” Rathenstein said. “The biomotors program finally produced the results we were looking for. It runs off of ATP, a nucleotide produced naturally by your body for intracellular energy transfer. Welcome to the molecular future.”

“Better living through chemistry, I guess,” Jimmy said with a weak smile. “Jess?”

“I spoke with your wife. She took it all quite well, considering. I told her you would call her around noon and then we would be getting you on your own personal VLJ home,” Rathstein continued.

“I shouldn’t put her through…” Foley could not finish the sentence and began to cough again. He thought of what time it must have been in New York when Rathstein had called. His job kept interfering with hers. As an investment banker, she made more than ten times his police salary. “I need to call her. And Susan, see what trouble she’s up to.”

“By the way, Jimmy, speaking of your family, I think I may have some possibly good news about your dad. I called his doctor on Long Island after you sent the doctor the e-mail authorizing me to consult.” Foley had almost forgotten their conversation about his father’s Alzheimer’s. Rathstein was sounding almost excited, which was unusual for the normally cautious doctor. “They have tried all the drugs and they’ve cleared some of the plaque, but they have not tried the continuous deep electrical stimulation or, of course, the experimental nano. So I persuaded my colleague at Cornell Medical Center to take him on as part of their test program. It may not work, but it’s definitely worth a try.”

“Mark, I can’t begin to thank…I mean…” Foley struggled for words. He held up his arm, reaching toward the doctor. Rathstein moved closer and let Foley grab his arm. Jimmy’s grip was still strong.

Rathstein noticed Foley swallow hard. “The others, Doc,” Jimmy rasped. “What happened at the raid?”

“You will have to talk to the naval investigators. They want to see you, but I told them you were being medevaced to your civilian medical system in New York. A buddy of mine at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan is taking you. He has worked with the new optic.”

Foley grabbed the bedsheet tightly with his right hand. “What happened?”

“The buildings were booby-trapped. Somehow the Bombot sweeps didn’t catch them. They all went up. We had about ten guys in emergency. Lot of surgery last night. I did two other eyes. Altogether, we installed an enhanced leg and two arms, three eyes.”

He paused. Jimmy opened his left eye and stared at him. Then Rathstein admitted, “We lost two Marines. They were not in the exoskeletons.”

To the doctor it looked like the news had put his patient in physical pain, clutching harder at the bedsheets.

“If they had been in the suits, none of them would have expired. I have to get the suits recertified for use. Maybe now that you have found the guys that were hacking into our net…” The doctor grimaced and looked out the window at morning sun, now beaming directly into the hospital room. “How can we do Netcentric warfare if…”

“We didn’t get them,” Foley whispered. “But I will, Doc. I will. I will find out who the fuck they are. And we will get those superman suits back on our Marines. You guys gotta be able to secure the link. No more wards filled with gyrenes without limbs. Not again. Not next time.”

Susan heard Soxster behind her. “Jimmy’s offline, flying back to New York, and you jet off to Vegas with Gaudium. Is the threat from China over and you didn’t tell me?” She was sitting in the upscale snack bar of the hip hotel in the Mandalay Bay complex. Unlike the theme-park hotels on the strip, The Hotel had no ubiquitous slot machines or other gambling paraphernalia. It could have been in Tribeca or on the Sunset Strip: quiet and elegantly cool. “How is The Breakfast and The Coffee?”

Susan smiled at Soxster’s lack of opening small talk as he appeared from behind her. Then she smiled at his red T-shirt, which read “Infocon Alpha 2012” and “I am not a Fed.” Below the words was a drawing of a cartoon figure in a trench coat, wearing a stethoscope and listening to a box connected to several telephones.

“You like it? All the federal law-enforcement and spy agencies come to Infocon to learn our latest techniques. I thought of getting you a Not Fed T-shirt, too, but…don’t you just hate people who lie with their T-shirts?” He rustled in a plastic bag and produced a folded blue T-shirt, which he passed across the table. “Instead, I got you this one.”

Susan unfolded the shirt. It read “I am not a terrorist” and had a drawing of Osama bin Laden with a red X across it.

“Good morning to you, too. And thanks, I guess, for the T-shirt.” Susan leaned across the small table. “Jimmy is doing fine. I just talked with him and he’ll be back to duty next week. Although my bosses want me to crack this case by Sunday for some reason. Fat chance.

“And, yes, we still have a real problem with the Chinese. I’m trying to find out what’s driving them crazy and get to their next targets before they do, instead of at the exact same time, like at SCAIF. It’s just possible that the hidden technology Gaudium knows about is that target.” She paused. “I can see what he’s talking about, you know. If we move ahead with Living Software, with Enhanced people, we’ll leave much of the world in the dust. We could also leave humanity in the dust.”

“Whoa, humanity in the dust?” Soxster mimicked. “Did Gaudium get you to drink some of his Kool-Aid? Talk about sleeping with the enemy.”

“Will is not the enemy,” Susan shot back, and then regretted it. “Fuck you. Look, mind your own business.”

“Wow, just a figure of speech,” Soxster said, backing away. “And what makes you think the Chinese aren’t doing this technology stuff, too?”

“They aren’t. I checked. The Chinese are good at large-scale implementation, but not big on innovation. And because the rate of technology acceleration is itself constantly increasing, once you get ahead, you stay there. Unless someone goes around blowing your shit up.” She had said all of that very quickly and then took a deep breath and slowed down. “No Kool-Aid, either. I just think that some of the issues Will raises are important. But for now, I’m just trying to get him to tell me where some of this technology is. Besides, you told me to go to Infocon.”

“Yeah, it’s a good place to learn what’s going on. Every cracker and hacker is here somewhere. Remember the difference?”

Susan sighed. “Yes, Sox, hackers are people who can take systems apart to learn how they work and break. Crackers are criminals who do the same thing with illegal intent. Do I get a star? More to the point, do you get one? Have you learned anything so far?”

Soxster put his right hand up to cover his mouth and spoke softly. “TTeeLer was hired by whoever was looking for hackers last year, around the same time as seven other top skill guys. They were all given tickets to L.A. Then they disappeared. Aside from TTeeLer, none of them has surfaced on the Net or in the so-called real world since…”

“Since what? Come on,” Susan insisted.

“Easy, easy,” Soxster countered. “Okay, so one of the other guys in the group with TTeeLer was Packetman. He’d been saying what a great hack it would be to take control of all the stupid robot canines just to show how bad their security is and how ridiculous an idea it is to have a dog as an automated personal assistant. He’d been working on the code.”

Susan saw from Soxster’s smile that there was more. “And…?”

Soxster rubbed his hands together gleefully and got that evil smile on his face again. “So I thought I would just look for Packetman, the way I found TTeeLer. I know his PGP key, so I thought I would put out some Netbots to see if I could find it anywhere and, eureka! He was in a secure chat room, but I got in, never mind how. And he’s talking about he got a big reward for penetrating the Man-O-War project. What’s that, some super-secret plan for a stealth destroyer or something? Apparently, they’re going to do something to stop it.”

“Got me. It means nothing to me.” She could see how disappointed Soxster was that his research had not been useful. “But I suppose what you found out does maybe tell us that the attack of the killer robot dogs was designed as a message about how bad our security is — how they can get through it, listen in to our offices, mess with our systems. It doesn’t make sense as anything else. But it doesn’t sound like a shot across the bow by China….”

“Maybe it does,” Soxster replied. “The robot dogs were all assembled in Guangzho, probably with a little extra programming in their firmware so they could be accessed and controlled later on. You guys ought to look at the pieces. Guess what else is assembled in places like Guangzho? Sytho routers and firewalls.”

“Sox, everything is made in China.”

“Yeah, but when that specific everything can connect to the internet, it gets worth their while to slip in a little extra on the motherboard, some little circuit we didn’t ask for that acts like software, opens up a hole in any firewall, responds to coded packets by opening up the control plane in a way that only they can issue it instructions.” Soxster sketched a circuit design on the back on a napkin. “Next thing, they can copy any packet moving on our systems, or replace them, or black-hole them.”

Susan frowned in confusion. “So you’re saying that the Chinese may have placed back doors in some electronics sold by some American companies?”

Soxster shook his head. “No. Not some. Most, if not all, the computer systems running our internet, our phones, our power grid, our trains and planes. Remember, Sooz, ‘everything is made in China.’”

“Touché,” she conceded.

“Infocon Alpha is starting up ’bout now. Let’s go hear your new buddy. Will? Was that what you called him?”

“Piss off,” Susan said, smiling.

Amid the crowd of T-shirt-and jeans-clad guys in the Mandalay convention center, Susan stood out because of her sex and her business suit. Soxster stood out because he was with her. They passed booths and tables set up by people who ten or twenty years earlier had been showing off their science fair projects in high school. Now they had freeware, shareware, and some special programs available for a price. The vendors and the attendees were the strangest set of conventioneers she had ever seen or could imagine. She suddenly had a sense of déjà vu. Sam Benjamin loved the old Star Wars movies and had made her watch them with him too many times. This was the cantina scene on Tatooine come to life!

Gaudium had just been introduced as they walked into the hall. He was walking up a set of stairs that rose up from the back of a very deep stage. An aging heavy-metal band was crashing out its noise, and there were literally smoke and mirrors. Blue smoke wafted up from below stage and ancient disco balls were spinning. The scene was replayed on two giant screens, one on either side of the stage and, also on the screens, streams of greenish numbers and symbols scrolled down and a sentence blinked on and off at the bottom. “Is he The One?” The crowd roared. When they quieted down, the band stopped and the disco balls ascended out of sight. The last whiffs of blue smoke floated out into the hall.

Will Gaudium began. “It’s time for humanity to take the red pill!”

The crowd roared again. Susan yelled in Soxster’s ear, “What does that mean?”

He looked incredulously at her and yelled back over the crowd noise, “The Matrix, sister. The pill that lets you see reality? Seriously, Susan, you gotta get out more!”

Gaudium continued. “We have seen a revolution in our time. The IT Revolution. It has made the world a better place. It has allowed us to share knowledge, strengthen free speech and human rights. But now it is going too far.

“The hardware and software I and others invented was for human use. But now we are giving control of IT over to the machines. Machines that write software humans can’t read or understand. Machines that run everything we rely on all day, every day. Machines that spy on what we say, what we write, what we eat, what we buy, what we do.

“Now IT is busy creating nanobots to enter our bodies and probes that will connect our brains to cyberspace. Science fiction? No! As a result of the Human Brain Reverse-Engineering Project, hundreds of humans have already downloaded much of their memories and thought patterns onto computers.”

The crowd buzzed.

“Now IT is joining up with genomics to create Enhanced humans — if we can even use the word ‘human’ to describe creatures with forty-eight chromosomes instead of forty-six. Science fiction? No! I know for a fact one laboratory has been generating just such creatures ever since last year!”

The buzz grew to a roar. “What’s he talking about?” Soxster asked Susan.

“Beats the shit out of me,” she replied, “but this is certainly not him in his mellow winemaker mood.”

“My friends, this is all no longer theoretical. The technology is accelerating every day. Most of the breakthroughs the public does not fully understand, and many they do not know about at all. If they even know about Living Software, they think of it as some benign way to make our programs run smoothly — but I am telling you: When a machine is as smart as a human, it will not be long before no human is as smart as a machine. If we allow Living Software loose in cyberspace, it will take over like kudzu in Carolina, like zebra mussels in a pond. The machines will no longer be our servants — they will be our masters. The Matrix? Science fiction? Not anymore!

“Four years ago, when we crossed over from eliminating genetic defects to creating Enhanced humans, science went over the line. Bio Fab and Synthetic Biology, which should be an oxymoron, is over the line. When they link up Globegrid and let Living Software run loose on it, we will cross the final barrier. We will have reached the Breakpoint!”

The crowd was quiet now, trying to absorb his words.

“We face a Hobson’s choice. As every new advance fundamentally alters what it means to be human, we will either destroy ourselves…or somewhere along that path, something will go very, very wrong. The only thing that might save us from destroying ourselves completely could be an event so terrible that it shocked us out of our complacency. Without Hiroshima, the Cold War might not have stayed cold. We do not wish disaster upon ourselves — we cannot — but in the world that we are creating, would it be the lesser of two evils if it wakes up and saves humanity from its own enslavement?”

“This is starting to creep me out,” said Soxster. “Can we go?” Reluctantly, Susan agreed. In the corridor, she said, “Sounds like your fellow hackers aren’t as willing as you to let Living Software put them out of business.”

“Yeah, well…” Soxster looked puzzled. “I have no idea what half of that stuff was. His Breakpoint sounds like Kurzweil’s Singularity, but downloading human brains onto computers? Forty-eight-chromosome people? Got me. I’d say he’s let the alcohol content of his pinot get too high.”

“Maybe we’ll find out at the Hilton,” Susan said absently. Seeing that she had only added to Soxster’s befuddlement, she continued “Oh, I forgot to tell you. He’s invited us both to lunch at the Hilton. Something to do with some theme park ride.”

Soxster rolled his eyes. “Will we have to kill what we eat?”

“You know who I am?” Brian Douglas asked the man on the other side of the steam room.

“Of course, Mr. Douglas. You arrived here on your diplomatic passport using your true name,” Wi Lin-wei replied in American-accented English. “I am sorry for the venue, but I have established a pattern. Patterns do not raise suspicion. I have a late-night massage and steam here two nights a week. You happen to be staying at the same hotel, using the same health club after your long flight. And meeting here, I can see that you are not carrying a weapon or a recording device.”

“Perhaps you have seen too many American gangster films, Mr….”

“I love movies, American, British. My name is Wi Lin-wei. I work in the office of President Huang.” He walked through the steam and dripping moisture toward Brian. “Your talent spotters would call me a midlevel functionary in a high level office.”

Brian Douglas was surprised at how high level the office was that this source worked in. “Your cousin, Hui, whom you have used as a cutout with us until now, said you had something so sensitive that I should fly my carcass all the way from London to hear it,” Brian said, continuing his tactic of placing the source on the defensive. “Are you here on your own or has somebody sent you?”

Wi looked at the low ceiling, where water droplets were hanging. “Let us say that there are a few who would be glad that I am providing you with this information, but if I am found out they could deny me three times, as Peter did to our Lord. And like our Lord, I would be crucified. I have placed my life in play here tonight, Mr. Douglas. You know what would happen if we were found together. My sources would not be able to save me. But they are high level, the highest.”

Brian Douglas considered his source. Perhaps he was just a very good actor. “And what is your motivation, Lin-wei, if I may be so direct?”

Wi Lin-wei used both hands to do a minor push up on the ledge and then swung his body back against the wall. Adjusting his large white towel, he began slowly: “I believe in what President Huang is building, a nation that is not only prosperous and has modern technology in the cities, but one that cares for the less successful, one that gradually allows more self-expression and institutions other than the Party.” He paused. Brian let the silence hang in the steam. Wi continued, “Mr. Douglas, I have spent some time on trade delegations. In Helsinki, in Stockholm, and even a little time in Edinburgh. No one there wants to overthrow the system, but they are allowed to worship as they choose and to join civil society organizations, to say and write what they want. Also, the governments provide for the less successful, even those in the countryside. I drove for a week throughout the countryside of Scotland with two colleagues. It is so green.”

When it was clear that there was no more coming, Brian asked, “So you love China and just want to see it better? And who does not, eh?”

“The PLA. The military leaders want order. They want the big companies they own to make money, not to share their profits with the poor and the villagers. More important to them even than money is the honor of China. They will sacrifice economic growth for that honor. And Taiwan is an offense to that honor, especially when it shoots down the PLA’s jets.”

It had all poured out of Wi so quickly and with such a tone of bitterness that Brian’s confidence in him increased. “The money we are paying you — that is not a factor in our meeting?” Brian queried.

Wi jerked this head around to face Brian. “Hui keeps all the money you give him. I told him I do not want your money. I do this for China.”

“You are a patriot, then, sir,” Brian responded, trying to offset any implied insult he may have made. “We cannot stay here much longer. They close the gym at midnight. What is the sensitive information that you want us to have?”

Wi leaned forward. “It is for the Americans, but I do not trust their people to get it to the top there. They lose important information and they leak it. Can’t connect the dots. You, I believe, can, your Sir Dennis and what The Economist called his English-speaking network of intellocrats.”

Brian could not suppress the smile that Wi’s observation produced.

Wi continued. “President Huang cannot always keep the PLA in line. He has let them go on an alert, moving the fleet out into the Pacific, arming missiles.”

“We’ve noticed,” Brian deadpanned, hoping that was not what Wi thought was sensitive.

“A dozen years ago, President Bill Clinton sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to waters off Taiwan when the PLA threatened. The American Navy claims publicly that it forced our fleet to turn around in the Indian Ocean during the Islamyah crisis a few years ago. If the U.S. Navy comes to Taiwan now, the PLA will not back down or run away, not without bloodying the Americans. And that could get out of control.”

“And the PLA thinks the American Navy is coming to defend Taiwan?” Brian asked.

“You tell me, Mr. Douglas.”

Was this all a ruse to get the answer to that question or to urge the U.S. to keep the 7th Fleet away? Brian wondered. “They don’t tell me their sailing plans. And if they did, of course, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“The PLA thinks that they will come — not just to defend Taiwan, but to retaliate for the bombings in America,” Wi replied, the tension rising in his voice.

“So the PLA did the bombings in America?” Brian said, almost casually.

“I don’t know. Neither does President Huang,” Wi insisted, “and if I did, I would tell you.”

If it was true about Huang, that was an interesting fact, Brian thought. “So what should I tell my cousins in America, Lin-wei?” As he spoke, the miniature device inside his ear canal beeped three times, stopped, and beeped three times more. Then he heard three clear code phrases. “Trouble,” Brian said, and moved quickly to the steam room door. He turned and looked at Wi, who was standing up, looking frightened. “Come with me now. Move!” Brian yelled at him.

“What? What is happening?” Wi asked in the locker area outside the steam room.

“There’s a police sweep, checking IDs in the lobby. Special Security police. Some are on their way down the stairs that lead to this spa, now. Grab your shoes, wrap them in your clothes,” Brian ordered. Grabbing his own things from his locker, Brian moved quickly to the rear of the room and jumped up on a bench. Wi followed quickly. Brian reached up and swung open a grate over a large air-conditioning panel. A flexible plastic ladder fell out. “Climb up as fast as you can,” he said to Wi. When Wi disappeared into the ceiling, Brian followed him and pulled the grate back up behind him. “Keep climbing,” he urged Wi. “Push on the grille up there on the left. Don’t let it bang. Let yourself down into the room.”

Brian heard voices, calling out in Chinese, from the spa locker room below him. He leaped down into the baggage storage room and saw Wi hurriedly hiding amid the suitcases. “The woman at the spa desk will have told them that there were still two people inside,” Brian said to Wi.

“No, I doubt it,” Wi said, shaking his head. “I pay her much money, twice a week.” Douglas looked skeptical. “I get happy ending after massage,” Wi admitted.

Brian chuckled, not only at Wi’s admission but at the sight of himself standing half-naked off the lobby of a five-star Beijing hotel. “All right, then we stay here for a while. You were saying…what I was to tell Washington’s pooh-bahs?”

The Chinese man dropped his towel and stood there in his briefs. “President Huang has some people in the Ministry of State Security that he trusts. He has them investigating the PLA’s role in the bombings in America. But he doesn’t know what to do when he gets the answers, doesn’t know how to stop the PLA and their supporters in the Politburo from doing something to Taiwan and its Independence Party. He needs help, Mr. Douglas.”

“The Special Security police don’t normally check IDs in a five-star hotel at midnight, Lin-wei. I would be very cautious, were I you.” Brian noticed that Wi was literally trembling. Then he noticed a yellow stain on Wi’s briefs. Apparently, he was a genuine source, or a truly excellent actor.

“I ordered you their blue Romulan ale. They don’t have pinot noir,” Will Gaudium said as Susan Connor and Soxster joined him. They were seated in a restaurant that looked like a movie set for some space-travel saga.

“Interesting choice of cuisine. Hi, call me Soxster.”

“It’s not the best place to dine in Vegas, but if we stayed at the Mandalay, I’d get hounded by the people at Infocon Alpha,” Gaudium said. “Besides, I want you to take the ride here, if you haven’t already. You get chased by the Borg.”

That figures, Susan thought. The Borg was a Star Trek creation: creatures that used to be human but had machine implants and were now part of a greater computer consciousness called The Collective. Gaudium was riding his hobbyhorse again.

“Do they catch any tourists?” Soxster asked. Susan scowled at him.

“It’s not fiction anymore,” Gaudium insisted to Soxster. “Did you hear my speech? Combine the Human Brain Reverse-Engineering Project with this Living Software monster, and then tell me how that’s different.”

Soxster looked at Susan. “May I?”

“Have at it,” Susan said, folding her arms across her chest and leaning back in the chair to watch.

“Look, Mr. Gaudium, I have enormous respect for what you did at Jupiter Systems, but I think you’re really overreacting. We’ve had human-machine interface for a while now. Cochlear implants that connect to the auditory nerve that connects to the brain — those are twenty years old. Artificial-vision devices connected to the optical nerve have been around for five years. Brain stimulating electrical systems for depression and other diseases for a decade or more.”

“But they weren’t connected to the internet,” Gaudium countered. “They weren’t memory boards to increase retention or processing, like with the nanotech they are fooling around with now…”

Soxster shook his head, disagreeing. “The human brain’s access to memory and knowledge made a quantum leap when we got the internet and then Google’s search engine. What difference does it make if I have to use my hands and fingers to access that ‘collective’ or if I just have to will the access with my brain? People who can’t move their arms were able to move a mouse around on a computer in 2004. If I wear a visor that lets me see the internet projected holographically in front of me, that’s fine, but if I see it in my mind’s eye, that’s not?” Soxster was on a roll. “And as far as Living Software being a monster, would you rather have the wild cybercrime and hacker penetrations we have now? Punctuated periodically by cyber disasters like in 2009? Living Software is nothing but a program that knows how to spot errors in computer language and then rewrite the language to fix them. And like Linux and the Open Source Movement, which you used to support, Living Software kernels communicate with each other about what they have seen and done so that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. It’s cool shit. Awesome. Something like the young Will Gaudium would have come up with.”

“I can refute everything you just said, but say you’re right — which you’re not, by the way.” Gaudium turned to look at Susan. “There is still the problem of nano and — let me finish, I listened to you — of genetic engineering. It’s one thing to write out the defects in human biological code, but another to add new capabilities and new chromosomes! How the hell does anyone know what they will do?”

“Okay,” Soxster said, “nanotech has to be regulated so we don’t all inhale tiny computers into our lungs every time we take a breath, I agree. But I’m no expert on DNA and genetics — are you saying that human evolution is over?” Soxster pointed his finger at Gaudium. “Please don’t tell me that you don’t believe in evolution, like your pal, Senator Bloviater. If he gets elected president, this country will become a theocracy, and then we can all act out Heinlein’s Revolt in 2300.”

“Of course, I believe in evolution, and no, I don’t think it’s over,” Gaudium agreed. “I’m a scientist. Senator George is just the only person willing to make the regulation of scientific and engineering advances a big issue, to promise that he will stop this unthinking leap into a posthuman future.”

“He can slow it, but he can’t stop it — no one can,” Soxster insisted. “Come on, you know that. Science and technology advance, that’s what they do. Your pinot noir grapes are highly cultivated hybrid clones that wouldn’t occur in nature. How do you know that humans altering their genetics isn’t the next step in evolution — a life-form becoming sentient and deciding how to adapt itself? That’s what Teilhard de Chardin thought: Technology leads to the ultimate evolution. And he was a Jesuit. Not your Breakpoint, but his Omega Point. If Neanderthals could talk, they might have sat around their caves jerking off worrying about the post-Neanderthal future. You talk about the Borg and space travel. How the hell do you think this sentient life-form is going to do deep-space travel without downloading brain function or doing significant genetic alteration? Maybe this is the beginning of the evolutionary step that permits deep-space travel? Maybe orthogenics is right and this is where evolution has been pointed all along.”

Sensing a pause in the oral combat, Susan jumped in. “Will, you said something in your speech about a lab that was already generating people with extra chromosomes. Is that really true?”

“Of course. Why would I make it up? I pay people to go out and track down these things. There’s a lab in the Bahamas where at least several hundred children have already been born with the additional chromosomes. The parents pay one hundred thousand dollars for it. The additional chromosomes are what their inventor called a ‘universal delivery vehicle for gene modules.’ Once the structure is in place, the parents can pick any number of attributes and input them into the embryo like options on a car. Don’t want to pass on your hairline? They have a modification for that. Mother die of breast cancer? They can help. Don’t like the weight you put on after college? They have a metabolic enhancement. ADD, dyslexia, almost anything predetermined by genetics, they can fix now or will be able to later. Do you think democracy will last long once we have a wealthy elite like that?”

“Can you prove it?” Susan asked.

“Want to see for yourself? I’ll have my pilot fly you there, Marsh Harbor. One of my men will meet you there and take you over to Man-O-War Cay, that’s the island where the lab is. You asked me to help you find underground technology that the Chinese might want to eliminate. Well, that’s certainly a candidate, don’t you think? They’ll want to eliminate an American super race. And maybe we should let them!”

“It’s a deal,” Susan replied quickly, “I’ll go.”

“I’ll set it up,” Gaudium said, getting up from the table. “I’ll call you with the details, but now I have to run to a press conference. Don’t leave here, however, without taking the ride.”

Susan and Soxster sat quietly until Gaudium had left the restaurant. Soxster took a drink of the blue ale and spat it back into the glass. He looked up at Susan. “How are your Memzax pills doing?”

“I remember. Will just said Man-O-War. Packetman knew about it, too. Something to do with penetrating their network. Stopping something.” Susan closed her eyes and repeated.

Soxster was quiet for a moment. Susan kept her eyes shut. “While I’m testing the strength of your biochemical memory enhancement,” Soxster said, looking at his watch, “Tell me this. What’s today’s date?”

She opened her eyes. “Friday the thirteenth. Why? Are you superstitious?”

Soxster shook his head no and smiled smugly. “Do you know why Friday the thirteenth is supposed to be bad luck? It’s the day in 1307 that the King of France lured the head of the Knights Templar, Jacques DeMolay, to his palace in Paris to capture him while simultaneously rounding up hundreds of Knights throughout Europe. Didn’t you read all that DaVinci crap a few years ago?”

“I had better things to do,” Susan said, and sipped the ale. With a pained look on her face as she swallowed, she asked, “So is there some moral to that story?”

“Yeah. Don’t do like DeMolay and get lured someplace where the other side has all the weapons.” Soxster put his hand on Susan’s. “Don’t go.”

“Are you kidding? I have to. If Will’s right about the place, it’s a prime candidate for whoever’s taking down our technology. The President thinks it’s China, and Sol and Rusty think he’s going to decide on retaliation in a matter of days. If we can uncover an attack before it happens, maybe we can find out who’s doing the attacks.”

“Then take Jimmy, or me — don’t go alone,” Soxster urged.

“Jimmy is convalescing with his wife in Manhattan. You need to get back to the Dugout and see what you can find in cyberspace about all this. I’ll be fine.”

Soxster looked unconvinced, but said nothing more. As they stood up to leave, a group of tourists came running into the restaurant, the kids screaming, being chased by actors dressed up like a cross between men and machines.

Soxster looked at Susan. “Let’s skip the ride.”