The Footprints of God

CHAPTER 45

WHITE SANDS

Rachel and I had to submit to three hours of drug-induced paralysis for the Super-MRI to produce the scans required for our neuromodels. During that time, the pres¬ident and the Joint Chiefs remained under surveillance in Washington, and the personnel at White Sands maintained an uneasy truce. General Bauer's armed threat against Ewan McCaskell had upset a lot of people, but since the general commanded all the troops at White Sands, no one but the president was in a position to do much about it. And the president seemed to have forgot¬ten the general altogether. Bauer spent most of the scan¬ning period closeted in one of the storage hangars.

Zach Levin's Interface Team managed the scanning procedure. The protocol involved considerable risk, especially for me, and Rachel didn't want me scanned at all. She pointed out that a neuromodel of my brain already existed, and that since its production had caused narcolepsy and hallucinations, a second was bound to have negative effects, possibly fatal ones. But Trinity insisted on a new scan, and I didn't argue. I agreed that what I'd experienced during my coma should pass into the new entity that would result when Trinity created the merged model.

Ravi Nara and Dr. Case from Johns Hopkins prepped us for the scans, a complex procedure requiring consid¬erable expertise. Conventional MRI scans only required that patients move as little as possible. Trinity's Super-MRI scans required absolute stillness, which could only be guaranteed by the administration of a paralyzing muscle relaxant. A ventilator breathed for the patient during the scan, while a rigid nonmetallic frame held the skull motionless. A sedative was given to prevent the panic of conscious paralysis. Special earplugs were also fitted, since the massive pulsed-field magnets used by the scanner produced an earsplitting screech that was eerily like the roar of Godzilla in Japanese movies. After all these steps were completed, the patient was pushed into the tubular opening in the scanning machine like a corpse into a morgue drawer.

It was possible to remain conscious during this process, and I chose to do so. Being paralyzed while con¬scious initially produced a nightmarish panic-especially in the claustrophobic space of the scanning tube-but after a few minutes, my mind adapted to its new state. That feeling of panic was probably similar to what a neuromodel experienced when it first became conscious within the Trinity computer.

Rachel hovered by the MRI control station during my scan, watching the monitor as my neuromodel was painstakingly constructed by the Godin supercomputers in the basement. The data generated by the scanning unit devoured staggering amounts of computer memory. Only a special compression algorithm developed by Peter Godin made it possible for a neuromodel to be stored in a conventional supercomputer. The only place a neuromodel could exist in an uncompressed-and thus functional-state was in the vast microcircuitry and holographic memory of the Trinity computer.

After I was pulled from the scanner, Rachel stroked my face and arms until my paralysis subsided. Then she took my place on the gurney and allowed herself to be intubated and prepped for her own scan. She chose not to be conscious during her procedure. As the sedative flowed into her veins, she told me in a slurred voice that she was imagining what it would be like to merge with me, not sexually, but as one mind. Lovers often talked about being linked in this way, but no two human beings had ever actually experienced it. Yet if Trinity could ful¬fill its promise, Rachel and I would soon be one.

Just before her eyes closed, she threw up an arm as if to ward off a blow. I wondered if she had seen an image of a vengeful Geli Bauer in her mind. As I laid her arm by her side, Zach Levin patted me on the shoulder, then wheeled Rachel's paralyzed body into the dark hole in the scanning machine.

LAB HANGAR TWO

General Bauer had been pacing the storage hangar for hours when Skow finally walked through the door and gave him a thumbs-up signal. The NSA man was covered in white gypsum, and a faint blue halo hung around his head. Dawn was coming over the desert.

"You found it?" Bauer asked.

"We found it."

Skow had been working with an NSA crew at an excavation site seven miles away. It was there that the data pipe from the Trinity computer met the massive OC48c cable that served the White Sands Proving Ground.

"It's a simple signal brilliantly concealed," Skow said. "Trinity's sending it to over five thousand computers around the world. If that signal stops or is interrupted, any one of them could retaliate in ways we know noth¬ing about. But we can duplicate the signal, and we've already got a computer at the excavation to do it."

General Bauer closed his eyes and made a fist. He had stripped off his coat and blouse, but now he stood and began to put them on.

"We still have one problem," Skow said.

"What?"

"We can't substitute our signal for Trinity's without Trinity detecting it. We need some sort of distraction to confuse the computer for a brief period."

General Bauer fastened his shoulder holster over his blouse. "That's not going to be a problem."

"Why not? You think that when Trinity starts to merge the two models, it will be too preoccupied to notice what we're doing?"

"No."

"Then what?"

The general smiled cagily. "I like to stick with proven methods."

"What do you mean?"

"The same as before, only different."

Skow puzzled over this. "But it was Godin's death that caused Trinity's confusion the first time. Godin can't die twice."

"That's true."

Skow went still. "Jesus. Do you think you can get away with that?"

"Why do you think I haven't been arrested? The pres¬ident knows Trinity has to be stopped, but he knows he can't tell anyone that. He can't do anything from where he is without Trinity knowing about it. But I can. We can. That's why he's left me loose."

Skow nodded, but he didn't look completely con¬vinced. "If Trinity enters another period of confusion like the one after Godin's death, why won't more Russ¬ian missiles be launched by the peripheral computers?"

General Bauer shook his head. "I'm banking that Trinity's taken care of that. The merging procedure has never been tried, and Trinity doesn't want catastrophic accidents any more than we do."

"And Tennant?"

"What about him?"

"You don't think there's anything to his idea about merging a male and female model? Getting the machine to voluntarily disconnect itself from the Net?"

Bauer snorted. "You heard what Trinity said. No matter who gets loaded in, they're not going to relin¬quish control. That machine will never agree to be dis¬connected from the Internet. And so long as that's the case, we'll be under its control. It's now or never, Skow."

The general buttoned his coat and walked toward the hangar door.

"Where are you going?" Skow asked.

Bauer smiled. "To see my daughter. It's long past time for a family visit."

ADMINISTRATION HANGAR

Geli was standing outside smoking a Gauloise when her father walked up the narrow road between the hangars and stopped a few feet away from her. The general looked tired in the dawn, older than he'd looked inside under the lights. Yet his strength remained. He had the same long muscles Geli did, and his grip could make men twenty years his junior grimace. His gray eyes found hers and held them, looking across three decades of pain and anger.

"I need you to do something for me," he said. "For you," she said. "You've got some fucking nerve."

"That's why I have this job."

She stared at the chiseled face, so set with certainty. "What is it?"

"After the models are merged, I need you to kill Tennant or Weiss."

"Or Weiss? It doesn't matter which?"

"No. The death of either will throw Trinity into dis¬array. That will allow the NSA to tap into Trinity's data cable and substitute its own signal, which will fool the computers that control the missiles into thinking every¬thing is fine. After that, we can kill the power to Trinity without worrying about retaliation."

Geli said nothing.

"Will you do it?"

"Why should I?"

An ironic smile curled the general's lips. "If I'd asked you not to kill them, you'd have said you were going to zap them in the next five minutes."

"You think so?"

"I think you hate me so much that you'll do the opposite of anything I tell you to. And that's all right. Hate is a useful emotion."

Geli had learned that lesson the hard way. "Do you know why I hate you?"

"Of course. You blame me for your mother's sui¬cide."

For him to refer to it casually, as though to some unim¬portant event, offended the deepest part of her being.

He took a step closer. "You think my women and my drinking finally pushed her over the edge. But you're wrong. I loved your mother. That's what you never understood."

"'Each man kills the thing he loves,'" Geli quoted. "Remember that one? 'A coward does it with a kiss, a brave man with a sword.' You're a coward where it counts."

The general shook his head. "I've been protecting you for a long time. But it's time you knew the truth."

She wanted to scream at him to shut up, but she couldn't find the words. No man could physically attack her without paying a heavy price, but she had no defenses against her father's psychological violence.

"Your mother killed herself because you enlisted in the army. Even after all that had happened in the past, you decided to follow in my footsteps. That's what did it. That's what finally put her in the ground."

Nausea made Geli waver on her feet, but she steadied herself and held her father's merciless gaze.

"I would have told you about it before," the general went on, "but… we both know what happened."

Geli's hands shook with rage. The scar on her cheek seemed to burn, yet still she could not find words.

"You hate me," said General Bauer. "But you're exactly like me."

"No," she whispered.

"Yes. And you know what has to be done."

CONTAINMENT BUILDING

Rachel came out of paralysis at 6:50 A.M. I handed her a liter bottle of water, and she drank most of it in a few gulps. Ten minutes later, Zach Levin announced that her neuromodel had been successfully compressed and stored.

The human work was done.

Rachel, Levin, Ravi Nara, and I walked around the huge magnetic shield that protected Trinity from the MRI machine and stood before the sphere. I thought Trinity might say something profound, but its words were purely technical.

"I've linked with the Godin Four in the basement, and I've begun a comparative study of the data in each neuromodel. Much of it is redundant, especially that which represents life support functions. I shall discard most of this during the merging process."

Levin said, "Do you feel confident that this subtractive operation can be done without negative effects?"

"Yes. It should also reduce or even prevent the period of adaptive shock that followed the loading of neuromodels in the past. This subtractive process is a necessity in any case. My crystal matrix can hold a virtually limit¬less amount of symbolic memory, but my total neuroconnections fall far short of the number required to hold two uncompressed models. A great deal of culling will have to be done, and not merely of life support func¬tions. When I begin to merge the higher brain functions, it will be a matter of art as much as science. "

"How long do you expect the process to take?" Levin asked.

"There is no precedent. "

"Very well. Thank you."

The lasers inside the carbon fiber sphere began to fire into the central crystal with hypnotic speed. On the plasma screen below Trinity, numbers and mathematical symbols scrolled past at a rate beyond human compre¬hension, reflecting the machine's internal operations in language created by man but which now served no use¬ful function.

We stood mute, as though watching a meteor shower or the birth of a child. As the process accelerated, I was thrown back to my boyhood, when I'd sat before the tele¬vision with my father and watched in wonder as Apollo 11 landed in the Sea of Tranquillity. Yet what we were witnessing now was incalculably more complex than the Apollo moon shot. Godin's team had already accom¬plished a miracle: the liberation of the mind from the body. But the Trinity computer was attempting to unify what nature-in the interests of survival-had sundered long before the evolution of Homo sapiens. The male and female minds, divided by biochemistry and by millions of years of environmental pressures, would now become one. When that was done, the most powerful force on the planet would no longer exist in a sundered state, eternally longing for its opposite. Perhaps in this state of wholeness, the new Trinity could bring hope to a species that seemed incapable of saving itself from its own worst instincts.

Levin went to the basement and returned with chairs for us. Rachel and I held hands, our eyes on the flashing blue lasers. As the firing rate accelerated, slowed, then accelerated again, I had the sense of watching someone working on a jigsaw puzzle: picking up pieces, examin¬ing them, discarding some, placing others in their correct positions. I had no idea how much time had passed when the radiant light within the sphere finally dimmed, and the voice of Trinity filled the room.

"My circuits are approaching the saturation level. The merging model has assumed responsibility for the security of the system. From this point forward it will also manage the final steps of the merging process. I've created a map for it to follow."

As if by tacit agreement, we all stood.

"I accomplished many things in my life," said the voice, and I knew then that the mind of Peter Godin was still alive in the machine. "I also did morally question¬able things. I would like to be remembered for what I do now. Today I voluntarily give up my life, and absolute power, so that something purer than myself can enter the world. Perhaps by so doing I truly approach the divine for the first time. Good-bye."

"It's happening," Ravi said, his voice surprisingly rev¬erent. "The impossible is happening in front of us. Duality becoming unity… yin and yang one."

I had never asked Nara about his religion; I'd always assumed he was Hindu. I was about to question him when a buzzer sounded in the room.

"What's that?" I asked.

"The door," said Levin. He touched a button, and an exterior view of the Containment building appeared on a small wall monitor. There was no one at the door.

"Weird," he said. The tall engineer walked around the magnetic barrier, headed for the door.

"Don't open it," said Rachel.

I walked far enough toward the wall to see around the magnetic shield. As Levin reached for the door han¬dle, a flat crack echoed through the building. Levin's hands flew to his ears, and the steel security door creaked outward on its hinges.

A black silhouette appeared in the smoky doorway and flung out an arm with stunning speed. Levin fell to the floor.

"What is happening?" the computer asked in the identical voice Godin's neuromodel had used.

Ravi Nara scrambled behind the black sphere of Trinity. I grabbed Rachel and raced for a door near the back wall. It didn't lead outside, but through the mag¬netic barrier to the control station in the MRI room. As I followed her through it, I glanced back and saw a flash of blonde hair above black body armor.

"Geli," I said, locking the door behind me and pushing Rachel through the control station. "Go to the basement!"

A short stairwell behind the control station led to the basement containing the Godin Four supercomputer. I hadn't been down myself, but I knew Levin's technicians were there, probably with the automatic weapons they'd used to fight off General Bauer's initial assault. Rachel raced down the steps, then came straight back up.

"The door's locked!"

I ran down and pounded on the metal with both fists. "Open the door, damn it!"

Nothing happened.

"David!"

Bounding back up the steps, I saw Geli peering around the edge of the magnetic barrier, forty feet away. I pulled Rachel behind the Plexiglas wall of the control station and shoved her down behind some computers.

Why hadn't Geli simply walked across the room and shot us? She thinks we have the assault rifles Levin's peo¬ple used. As soon as she realizes we don't, we're dead.

Levin groaned from the floor by the door, but he didn't move.

"Where is she?" Rachel hissed from the floor.

As I glanced down to reply, an invisible hammer slammed me against the wall. My shoulder went numb, and my face felt like it was on fire. The sound of the gunshot seemed to arrive long after the bullet, which had shattered the Plexiglas and peppered my face with razor-sharp fragments.

Rachel tried to stand, but I shoved her back down.

Geli stepped from behind the barrier and walked cau¬tiously across the MRI room, her pistol aimed at my chest, her eyes flicking back and forth.

There was no weapon to hand and nowhere to run. As I awaited the final bullet, time dilated around me. Geli moved in slow motion, like a leopardess stalking her prey. I looked down into Rachel's eyes, knowing they would be my last sight on earth.

Rachel took my hand and closed her eyes. As she did, I noticed a large red button on the switch panel beside her head. The letters below it read PULSED-FIELD INITIATOR.

I slammed my hand down on the button.

The crack of a gunshot died in the inhuman screech of the Super-MRI machine. I looked up and saw Geli bent double and clenching her right hand, which was dripping blood onto the floor. The scanner's colossal magnets had ripped the gun from her grasp like the hand of God and had probably taken at least one finger with it.

Her pistol appeared to be glued to the wall of the MRI machine. Not far from it hung a knife, probably yanked from Geli's belt by the magnetic field. Suddenly the screeching ceased, and both gun and knife dropped to the floor.

Geli advanced toward me, her eyes filled with mur¬derous rage. I stepped out from behind the panel, but with a useless shoulder there was little I could do. Geli had nearly killed me on the steps in Union Station, when I had the use of both arms.

"Why are you doing this?" I asked.

She knocked me to the floor with a lightning kick to my chest, then sat astride me and clenched her hands around my throat. I felt her thumbs searching for my windpipe.

"Stop!" Rachel screamed from the control station. "There's no reason anymore!"

I tried to fight, but once again Geli had leverage on her side. My carotid arteries were closing off, and with them consciousness. I felt as I had so many times on the edge of narcoleptic sleep. But this time, as the black wave rolled over me, a piercing scream penetrated the center of my brain. It was the scream of a child witness¬ing something too terrifying to endure, almost beyond the range of human hearing, filled with suffering and impossible to shut out. That scream pulled me back to consciousness, back toward the light… and then sud¬denly it stopped, the silence in its wake as empty as a dead planet.

Into that silence came a voice I was sure had spoken from within my hypoxic brain, a voice of preternatural calm pitched somewhere between the male and female registers.

"Listen to me, Geli," it said. "The man beneath you is not the man you hate. Tennant is not the man you want to kill. The man you want to kill is behind you."

The viselike grip on my throat remained, but I felt Geli's body twist. I opened my eyes. She was looking over her shoulder at something I couldn't see.

"Finish it!" shouted a harsh male voice. "Do your job!"

General Bauer had entered Containment.

Geli's grip tightened on my throat, but the light in her eyes no longer blazed.

"I know you, Geli," said the strange voice. "My heart aches for you. I know about the scar."

Geli froze.

"Listen to your father, Geli. Listen to the truth."

General Bauer's voice filled the room, but it was not coming from his throat. It was coming from Trinity's speakers.

"That scar? I'll tell you why she never got it fixed. Three weeks after her mother died, she came home from basic training and tried to kill me."

The hands remained on my throat, but the strength had gone out of them.

"She'd heard about how infantry grunts used to frag officers they hated in Vietnam. You know, put a grenade in the latrine while they were using it and take them out. "

General Bauer stood with his head cocked in amaze¬ment as he listened to his own voice coming from the speakers. His right hand held the black 9mm Beretta I'd seen her pull on McCaskell.

"I was drinking that night, in bed. She thought I was asleep. Maybe I was. She came in and laid a fucking white phosphorous grenade on my bedside table. From reflex my hand popped out of the covers and grabbed her wrist. Her scream woke me up, and I saw the grenade. Well, I just rolled off the far side of the bed, like any old soldier would. But she was stuck on her side and had to run for it. The Willy Pete blew before she cleared the door. That's where she got the scar. And that's why she won't get it fixed. That scar is her mother's suicide, her hatred of me, her whole sad fuck¬ing life. Pathetic, really. But she's a hell of a soldier. Hate's good fuel for a soldier."

Geli scrambled off me and moved toward her father, her hands loose and ready at her sides. I couldn't see her face, but at least her body was blocking her father's line of fire.

"Who were you talking to?" Geli asked, her voice ragged. "Who did you tell that to?"

"Get out of the way!" the general shouted.

"Listen to me, General," said the eerie voice that had just saved my life. "Why do you want to kill me? You've killed so much of yourself already. You've killed much of your daughter. But I am what is pure in you. What is pure in man. Where is hope if you kill me?"

I began to crawl backward toward the control sta¬tion.

The general aimed his gun at me, but Geli moved to block his line of fire.

"Do you love darkness more than light?"

The voice was irresistible, like that of a child. Yet General Bauer ignored it. He moved laterally, trying to get a clear shot at me.

"Put down the gun," Geli said, holding up both hands. Was she trying to save us?

"No more," she said. "No more!"

General Bauer's waxlike expression didn't change. Nothing that his daughter or the computer said was going to get through. He moved farther to his left, toward the MRI unit, angling for a kill shot.

"Will you kill me to do this?" Geli asked.

I looked back at the shattered Plexiglas shield, willing Rachel to act. She was staring hypnotized at the deadly dance between Geli and her father.

"I won't kill you," General Bauer said. Then he lashed out with the heavy pistol, knocking Geli aside as easily as he would a child.

As she fell, the general swung the barrel of his gun toward me, but in that moment the Super-MRI screeched and he was knocked off his feet as though by a howitzer shell. His pistol slammed into the MRI scanner and hung there as though welded to the machine.

Rachel knelt over me, probing my shoulder with a finger.

"Help me up," I grunted.

"Stay down."

"Please… get me up."

I struggled to my knees. Rachel got under my good shoulder and helped me to my feet.

Geli was sitting beside her father, looking down in disbelief. The general's neck was covered in bright red blood, and his eyes were glazed open. He'd been stand¬ing between the gun and the MRI scanner when Rachel hit the initiator. The huge pulsed-field magnet had snatched the pistol to itself with irresistible force, and whatever was in the way went with it. In this case, it appeared to be part of the general's throat.

"John Skow is still trying to shut down the com¬puter," Geli said in monotone. "I don't think he can do it with both of you alive."

"I am safe," said Trinity. "And I am sorry for you, Geli."

Rachel and I walked slowly around the magnetic shield. The black sphere waited, its blue lasers pulsing like a heartbeat within the web of carbon. On the screen beneath it, I saw an image of myself and Rachel looking into Trinity's camera.

"Do you know us?" I asked.

"Yes," said the childlike voice. "Better than you know yourselves."