Triggers

Chapter 51

Pteranodon—the E-4 Advanced Airborne Command Post—continued its westward flight through the darkness, the black waters of the Pacific far below.

Susan Dawson—the physical body of the Secret Service agent—was still in President Jerrison’s office at Camp David. She had previously doubled over in pain but now fought to dismiss it from her mind.

Alyssa Snow—again, the body called by that name—was attending to the form called Seth Jerrison, who also had been experiencing great pain.

Susan felt herself simultaneously inside and outside her body, and what Singh knew about observer and field memories came to her: sometimes you remembered things as your eyes had seen them, and sometimes you saw yourself in your memories, as if observing from a distance. But this was both simultaneously—both an in-body and an out-of-body experience. She looked at Dr. Snow—and looked at herself looking at Dr. Snow—and saw in Alyssa’s eyes that she must be experiencing the same duality.

The president’s face was a battleground, with grimaces coming into existence and then being suppressed. Susan watched for a moment in concerned fascination, but then saw a preternatural calm come over Prospector’s face, as if he was now drawing strength from all the linked minds. “My God,” he said. “It’s wonderful.”

Perhaps fifty million people were linked together now—but there were still seven billion who weren’t. The daybreak line would continue to sweep across Canada, the US, and Mexico, but it would be four hours until New Zealand—the first non–North American landmass of any size—saw the dawn, at about the same time that Ketchikan, Alaska, did. If it really was going to take a full day for the effect to circle the globe, covering fifteen degrees every hour, then the United States would be fully absorbed long before Russia or China or North Korea.

“We’re not safe,” Susan said. “If those who aren’t linked decide that we’re an abomination, they could nuke us. We have to maintain the appearance of normalcy until tomorrow morning—until the transition is complete.”

“But how?” asked Jerrison. “Everyone would have to act in concert to maintain the illusion, and…oh.”

Susan nodded. “Exactly. We’re linked; we’re one.”

“E pluribus unum,” said Jerrison, his voice full of awe. He looked at Singh, then back at Susan. “Still, it can’t be that everyone wants this. Why’s it happening?”

“It’s like my kirpan,” Singh said. “An instrument of ahimsa—of nonviolence; a way to prevent violence from being done to the defenseless when all other methods have failed.”

Susan looked at him, and he went on. “In the ancient past, a crazed human could only kill one other person at a time. Then we developed the ability to kill small groups, and then larger groups, and still larger groups, and so on, until now a person can take out a major portion of a city, or”—and Singh glanced at Jerrison—“even a whole country, and soon after that, the whole wide world.”

“And so this is happening?” Susan said. “We’re linking together as a survival strategy?”

“I think so,” said Singh. “Once again, the needs of the many will outweigh the needs of the few; the human race in aggregate will do the things that are best for the human race. The individuals will still exist, in a way, and those that need to do work to support the collective still can: farming and maintaining the infrastructure of civilization, but—do you feel it? Any of you?”

Darryl Hudkins spoke up. “I do,” he said, and then, “We do.”

Singh looked at him and nodded. “It’s gone, isn’t it? Racism, prejudice. Gone. Hatred, abuse. Gone. They were never the majority state of the human race—or, at least, hadn’t been for decades and maybe longer—and they’re being diluted away into nothingness as the gestalt grows.”

Susan looked out the window. The sun wasn’t directly visible anymore, but the trees were still casting long shadows. It had been perhaps two hours since daybreak, meaning it would presumably take another twenty-two hours for the process to finish. She was worried that someone here who had ties to people in Russia or China or another nation with nuclear weapons would alert them, urging them to stop the expansion in the only way they could.

But no—no. This was too good to wreck, this was too wonderful to derail, this was too necessary to stop.

On that point, all those who had been affected were of one mind.

Day came to Montana and Wyoming and Colorado and New Mexico. And then to Washington state and Idaho and Utah and Arizona. And, at last, it swept west into California, the sun clearing the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Pteranodon continued its nighttime flight. Peter Muilenburg was pleased that the aircraft carriers and B-52s were all now on station, right on schedule. Of course, the E-4 wasn’t going all the way to South Asia; there was no need for the command post to be proximate to the theater of operations. He wanted it positioned where it could get ground support, and there really was nowhere more appropriate, the secretary of defense thought, than west of Honolulu, high above Pearl Harbor—still the headquarters of the United States Pacific Fleet.

Susan Dawson now knew things she had never known.

The complete works of William Shakespeare.

Every verse of the Bible, and the Qu’ran, and every other religious text.

How to identify thousands of species of birds and thousands of kinds of minerals.

She knew calculus and how to play the stock market. She understood rainbows and tides. She knew why Pluto wasn’t a planet.

She could play hundreds of musical instruments and speak many dozens of languages.

And she remembered countless lives: millions of first days at school, millions of first kisses, starting millions of new jobs, and millions of dreams about a better tomorrow.

Yes, there were unpleasant memories, too, but it came to her—it came to everyone—that there was no need to add to their number. How much better it was to share contented, positive, happy memories—and the best way to ensure that most of the new ones recorded from now on were just that was to help rather than hurt, to share rather than hoard, to support rather than belittle, and, of course, to love rather than hate.

“Mr. Secretary?” said a uniformed aide coming into the conference room aboard Pteranodon.

“Yes?” replied Peter Muilenburg.

“We’re on station above Pearl Harbor and circling. The commander invites you up to the cockpit. He says the view should be spectacular.”

Muilenburg got out of his swivel chair, walked past the long table, and exited the room. He took the staircase to the upper deck, entered the cockpit, and stood with one arm on the back of the commander’s chair and the other on the back of the copilot’s.

The sky was brightening. He watched from high above as the sun climbed up from the gently curving ocean horizon, spilling color and warmth and light all around.

“Beautiful,” Muilenburg said, when he’d seen his fill. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” replied the commander. “Perfect day for an operation, isn’t it?”

The secretary of defense replied, “I’m aborting Counterpunch.”

“But sir!” said the navigator, who hadn’t been looking out the window, hadn’t yet gazed upon the dawn, hadn’t yet seen the light. “The president said you have to go through with it.”

Muilenburg shook his head, “As my son would say, ‘Let’s not, and say we did.’ ”

“Peter,” said the commander, turning now in his seat, “you don’t have a son.”

“True,” replied Muilenburg. “But someone I know—or, at least, I know now—does.”

Susan had never heard the term before, or, if she had, it hadn’t registered; it was nowhere in her memory. Indeed, it was, she discovered, absent from most people’s memories: the Singularity. But some knew it, and so now she did, too: the moment at which machine intelligence would supposedly exceed human intelligence, sparking lightning-fast technological progress that would leave plain old Homo sapiens far behind.

But what the partisans of the Singularity had glossed over was that machines were not getting more intelligent as time went on; they had zero intelligence and no consciousness, and no matter how fast they got at crunching numbers, they were still empty.

And yet the predicted surge had come: the vast, all-encompassing, world-changing whooosh of accelerating power. It was a chain reaction, an unstoppable cascade. But rather than machines, it was human beings amplifying each other, the wisdom of crowds writ large, the society of minds spreading far and wide.

To know everything, to understand all, to appreciate the totality of nature, of literature, of mathematics, of the arts. And to be free, at last, of duplicity and mendacity, of concerns about reputation, of establishing hierarchies, of all the game playing that had gone with petty individuality. It liberated so much of the intellect, so much energy—and it brought peace.

Susan Dawson didn’t regret the old life she’d lived—a life she, and everyone, would always remember—but this new existence was so much greater, so much more fulfilling, so much more stimulating.

And it had only just begun.