Zimmerman's Algorithm

3.08 Fri. Mar. 26

RUTH faded back into the crowd of scientists and technicians who were gravitating toward her end of the barn. No one seemed to know what to make of Gideon's escape. Ruth didn't know what to expect herself. She made way with the others as Volynskji pushed toward the rear door with three of the guards.

They paid no attention to her.

Moments later, the gunfire started, and all the technicians scrambled away from the door, back into the barn. The crowd pushed Ruth back, forcing her to take cover in one of the office cubicles. The gunfire continued, and Ruth could hear the sound of splintering wood.

She ducked, afraid that a gunshot would cut her down any moment.

After several bursts of gunfire, a disturbing quiet filled the barn around her. Ruth stood, and—at first—thought that the barn had emptied completely. The only sound was the rumble of the generators. The scientists and technicians all appeared to have retreated out the front door, probably toward the perceived safety of the farmhouse.

The door at the other end of the barn was guardless and wedged open. Ruth took a few steps in that direction. With all the armed men after Gideon, it seemed a possible route of escape.

But, escape where?

She took a few steps in that direction anyway, until she realized that the barn had not emptied completely. Julie was still sitting at the one terminal at the far end of the office cubicles. And D'Arcy was standing over her, holding a gun.

Julie was saying, in a voice that seemed way too calm, "You have what you want, the shooting destroyed our uplink." She looked at the screen. "It doesn't matter, though."

D'Arcy's knuckles were whitening on the gun he held on Julie. "Tell me what you did to my project."

"Your project?" Julie said.

Ruth winced at her tone. It was the voice that she'd used to point out the "obvious." It wasn't the kind of attitude that someone should take with a man holding a gun. What have you done, Julie?

Neither seemed to see Ruth, so she edged around to the other side of the cubicles and started inching up on D'Arcy from behind.

Julie was still talking. "It never was your project. You never even understood what we were doing."

D'Arcy was agitated. "You have the AI, don't you? It's locked up in the Daedalus now?" He kept the gun level on Julie. "I need that program."

Still, in the oddly calm and condescending voice Julia said, "You need your trophy so that you can walk back to Washington and have them forgive your excesses." Ruth couldn't see her, but she could picture the way she was shaking her head. "It's not going to work like that. Not with Aleph."

There was more gunfire, muffled and far away.

"What are you talking about?" D'Arcy's voice was high and strained. "We've got Aleph, here, in this machine."

There wasn't anything else around that she could use as a weapon, so Ruth stopped in a cubicle and carefully detached a keyboard. She had some thought of braining D'Arcy with it.

She wished she still had the guard's rifle.

"Our Daedalus is nothing without the uplink. You think we could hold Him, here ?"

"What?"

"There's infinitely more to Aleph than you're able to imagine. What we have here is the merest glimpse of the ultimate intellect. He does not recognize the boundaries of space or geography."

"You were producing an artificial intelligence—"

Julia snorted. "There is no artifice here. What we found was a window into something that has always existed. The universal intellect. This isn't, can not, be bound to a single machine, however advanced—"

"You needed the Daedalus!" D'Arcy's voice sounded desperate now. Ruth knew he couldn't accept it. There wasn't a spiritual bone in D'Arcy's body, and his weakness was that he had believed Julia had been operating on the same cynical, pragmatic level he was.

"You cannot put God in a box." Julia had yet to look away from the screen. Ruth was approaching, and could just about see the screen in front of Julia now. "He was always there," Julia said. "We only need the machines to see Him."

Ruth closed on D'Arcy, raising the keyboard. She could now read what was on Julia's screen.

Two words.

"I AM."

Something outside exploded.

A single message scrolled across computer screens at Washington National Airport. With a crowd of others, Senator Tenroyan watched the words flashing across the departure and arrival screens.

"I AM."

Tenroyan felt a deep unease as he wondered: Who?

Those two words appeared on the screens of countless ATM machines across the country. It appeared in Cyrillic on the safety monitors in old Soviet nuclear power plants. It appeared, with infinite repetition on computerized tickers in brokerages across Wall Street. And those words were the sole response to any computer trying to retrieve information from the Internet.

For ten, perhaps fifteen minutes, every networked computer on the planet joined in a single expression of identity . . .

"I AM."

Just before Gideon was about to raise his head, the helicopter exploded.

He didn't hear it—the sound simply pain, felt inside his ears. A hellish wind slammed into his body, as if he were buried under a flaming carpet. He felt the dagger of something hot and sharp dig into his side.

Gideon lay where he was for another thirty seconds. The only sound seemed to be the rush of his pulse in his ears. When he felt the blast was over, he rolled onto his back to see what had happened.

He winced and grabbed his left side, above the hip. His clothes there were warm with blood, and he could almost feel it pumping out of the wound. He could see steam rising into the cold air from his hands, which were already slick and black with gore.

Gideon turned his head, and saw the wreckage of the helicopter. It had collapsed partially, its tail dangling like a broken tree limb, flames licking from the inside, casting a deathly rose glow over the area around him.

He looked the other way, and saw that one of the helicopter blades had impaled itself as far away as the split-rail fence.

In the air above the farm, silent to Gideon's blast-numbed ears, he saw a trio of helicopters hovering above the house and the barn. As he watched, he saw men dropping down from the bellies of the choppers on black rappelling lines.

Gideon saw Volynskji and three other guards rise from the snow at the edge of the clearing. They were turning to face the woods.

Volynskji yelled something.

Gideon couldn't hear what it was above the sound of his own pulse. The guards raised their weapons and fired at something that Gideon couldn't see.

Another helicopter swept in from the woods. This one narrower than the others, with a cannon slung under its nose. Gideon saw the flash of the cannon, and the ground around Volynskji's guards erupted in a dozen explosions of snow and dirt. Only one or two shots hit Volynskji, but they were enough to tear his body in half.

Gideon gasped, and felt himself growing light-headed. He tried to keep pressure on the hole in his side, but he couldn't keep himself from blacking out.

The explosion shook the walls of the barn and set the hanging fluorescents swinging. D'Arcy turned toward the noise. That meant he also turned toward Ruth, who was in the process of bringing the keyboard down on D'Arcy's head.

D'Arcy saw Ruth and brought the gun around to bear on her. Ruth had too much momentum going for her to stop now. All she could do was try to shift the trajectory of the keyboard so it intercepted D'Arcy's gun. She shifted too late.

She watched D'Arcy's finger tighten on the trigger. Then, suddenly, Julie was there between them, grabbing D'Arcy's gun arm.

There was a gunshot as the keyboard struck D'Arcy's left shoulder, far away from the gun and Julie. Keys flew everywhere, some bouncing off the lights above with a dull metallic noise.

Julie slid to the ground by D'Arcy's feet, and D'Arcy just stared at her, as if he wasn't quite sure what had happened.

"You bastard!" Ruth said the words hard enough to sear her throat. Anger burned her as she bent for her sister, and she didn't know if it was anger for D'Arcy, at herself, or at Julie for such a stupid move.

Ruth knelt and rolled Julie over so she could see her face. Blood was everywhere. The bullet had entered her chest and hadn't come out. D'Arcy stared at both of them, a dumbfounded expression on his face.

"This wasn't what. . ." His voice trailed off.

Ruth was crying. "No." The word was ashes in her mouth. She gripped Julie as if she could keep her here by force.

Julie raised a hand to Ruth's where it gripped her shoulder. Ruth's hand was shaking, its knuckles white, and Julia stroked it. "You cared about me, whatever I did—you shouldn't have . . ." Julie coughed, blood flecking her lips.

"Quiet. Save your strength." Ruth pulled her hand away and moved to put pressure on the wound. Ruth let out a shuddering half-gasp, half-sob when she felt the sickening sensation of Julie's breath through the hole under her hands. "We'll get you to a hospital," Ruth said, talking fast, to her or Julie she wasn't quite sure. "You're going to be all right. You have to be. I can't lose you again— Damn it, think of what'll happen to Mom!" She was yelling now, the explosion still going on, a roaring in her ears.

D'Arcy was backing away from both of them, holding the gun leveled at Ruth.

Julia's voice was shallow and wheezy. "This was inevitable—"

"Damn it, you can’t!" Ruth gripped the wound until both her arms were shaking, trying to hold it all in even though everything Julie was seemed to be leaking through her fingers.

Julie smiled, her expression was peaceful. "After this, there's nothing left for me to do. . ."

Julie's face went slack, the eyes staring at something only they could see. Ruth tried to press harder on the wound, as if she could push the life back into her.

"No, damn you. Damn you!" Ruth looked up at D'Arcy, her face smeared by tears and flecks of Julie's blood.

D'Arcy wasn't looking at her. Ruth realized that he heard the roaring as well, the sound of a helicopter. More than one. The sound of gunfire, too.

Ruth heard the sound of someone coming through the door in front of the barn. She couldn't see it from where she knelt, hands still clutching Julie's wound. D'Arcy turned toward the door, gun still in his hand.

The intruders never gave him the chance to bring it to bear. In the act of turning, D'Arcy was riddled with gunfire coming from the door. The impact spun him around in a complete circle until he fell, face-first onto the floor, knocking one of the floor panels askew. He lay, unmoving, half in the hole it made.

The sound of booted footsteps closed on her, and Ruth tried to shrink in on herself, as if she could curl into a ball around Julia's body and disappear completely.

Then two soldiers were standing above her, their goggles and Kevlar helmets making them seem like alien creatures. Ruth looked up, expecting them to raise their guns and finish the job that D'Arcy started.

Instead, one of the men knelt, looked at Julie, and raised a walkie-talkie to his face and said, "We need a medic in the barn. We have another civilian casualty."

The soldier looked at Ruth, took off the helmet and the goggles, and said softly, "Don't worry, madam; we'll get you out of here."

One hour and forty-five minutes after it began, it was over. Senator Tenroyan was watching as the Arrival and Departure screens flickered on the cryptic, alien message, then suddenly resumed normal operation. In a moment the screens were filled with flight numbers, gate numbers, and times—quite a few highlighted red for delayed or canceled flights.

Within moments, computers that had been the subject of some strange possession resumed normal operation, all as if nothing had happened.