Desh nodded. He had discovered this as well. Kira had broken into classified government computers and studied nuclear weapons. But she had studied biological ones also. Why had this been necessary? “You studied biological weapons as well, didn’t you?” said Desh.
Kira nodded. “Impressive deduction,” she said in admiration, having no idea that it was not deduction. “Why reinvent the wheel? We needed to optimize the spread of the nanites. And the government has performed extensive modeling and analysis of the spread of pathogens as part of their defense against bioweapons.”
Desh couldn’t help but smile stupidly. She was doing it. She was putting endless and seemingly unrelated puzzle pieces together into a seamless whole.
“Anyway,” continued Kira, “as I said, designing nanites capable of detonating nuclear warheads would have been quite challenging. And designing nanites capable of cleaning up radiation and transforming the atmosphere even more so. But it turns out that designing them to render nuclear weapons impotent was fairly easy. A nuke requires uranium enriched to levels that are very difficult to achieve, using high science and endless ultracentrifugation. So if you introduce even small impurities into your enriched uranium, your nuke becomes a door stop.”
Desh knew this was absolutely the case. “So was Matt in on the plan from the start as well?” he asked.
“That’s right. He was a key player also. It may be difficult to detonate a nuke using nanites, but it’s impossible to tap into alien nanites, running alien software, and get anywhere. But we played a magician’s trick. Matt did so much that seemed impossible while on the Copernicus, by the time he finished his act, even the most jaded scientists would believe anything he did was possible. And Matt wasn’t tapping into alien nanites to try to figure them out. He helped to build them in the first place. Using code that he developed while enhanced to look alien and to be incomprehensible to a normal mind. So he knew exactly how to get the nanites to disgorge the fake end-of-the-world scenario. Because he had implanted it. The timing between his discovery of the nanites’ evil purpose and time zero was carefully planned. Much longer and the story would have leaked before they could be stopped, which would have been a disaster.” She shook her head sadly. “Enough people died around the world from panic and riots during this fiasco as it was.”
Desh was finding it hard to get his arms around the enormity of what Kira had done. “So just to be clear,” he said, “are you telling me that every nuclear weapon on earth is now disabled?”
“Every one,” she replied proudly. “Eventually, my hope is that the nations of the world will disarm them anyway. When the species has gained back some sanity.” She paused. “In the meantime, of course, governments can’t know they’ve been disarmed.”
“Why not?”
“If a psychopathic killer has a gun, better to fool him into loading it with blanks than to steal it. If you steal the gun, he’ll just get another one. With blanks, he’s clueless until he’s ready to massacre a campus. Then his gun doesn’t work. But his attempt still manages to attract the police.”
“You’ve been thinking about this metaphor for a while haven’t you?”
“Maybe,” allowed Kira with a smile. “We’ve set the fictitious arrival of the alien armada to give an entire generation of humanity a chance to see themselves as a single species,” she explained. “Fighting a common enemy.”
Desh frowned. “But you’ve also condemned an entire generation to fear the skies. To fear the approach of doomsday.”
A guilty look crossed Kira’s face. “I know. In my defense, the plan wasn’t mine. Transcendent Kira made the calculation that the negative consequences couldn’t be helped. That if this wasn’t done, not enough people would fear the approach of doomsday—ensuring we brought it on ourselves within ten years.”
Desh tilted his head in thought as the van accelerated briskly. Griffin was probably on the onramp to a highway, heading for the nearest woods. “You said that when you were at the second level, you implanted three scientific breakthroughs into your normal mind. One involved ZPE, and one involved nanites. Did I miss the third?”
Once again Kira gazed at him with unabashed admiration. “Nice to see you’ve been paying attention,” she said playfully. “The third breakthrough was the principle behind a gravitational wave detector. Ross had a scientist on his team take the credit for this discovery, which, as you know, has revolutionized cosmology. He had to time its release just right. If this technology was available when he launched the fake alien ship, someone might have detected it on its outbound journey—which we couldn’t have. So he programmed the craft to hang out in interstellar space while the technology was adopted, so that it would be detected on the way back. It was critical for the entire world to know the alien ship was on its way. So the existence of advanced aliens would be hammered into the world’s consciousness like a spike. And with enough advanced warning so the nations of the world would band together to prepare. The Copernicus was perfect.”
Desh smiled appreciatively. “Your alter ego thought of everything.”
“Being nearly omniscient has its advantages,” said Kira wryly. “But believe me, she didn’t think of everything.”
“Wait a minute,” said Desh as a new thought occurred to him. “Does this mean that Madison Russo is on Ross’s team?”
“Great deduction, but actually no. We had to be sure the alien ship was discovered, and we did choose out someone on Ross’s team for that purpose.” She shook her head. “But Madison Russo beat him to the punch by five or six hours. Surprised the hell out of us. And it was a setback, if only a minor one.”
“Why?”
“We knew whoever discovered the ship would be a part of the international effort to study it, and we wanted a few more of our people on Copernicus.”
“A few more?”
“We had three others. The Copernicus tapped the best and the brightest. The same group of people Ross was tapping.” She shook her head. “But we decided not to use them. It wasn’t required, and again, everything was on a need to know basis.” She paused. “We had only one chance to get this right.”
“It seems to me the plan had a fatal flaw. You were lucky it all worked out, but what if you hadn’t been able to place Matt as the head of the nanite team? What if Jake hadn’t called you? Or hadn’t conceded to Matt’s demands to work on Copernicus?” Desh paused in thought and a troubled look came over his face. “Wait a minute. Does this mean you’re responsible for Jake coming after us in the first place? Because you knew he’d end up being part of the international effort?”
She laughed. “Not even transcendent Kira is that good. No plan survives engagement with the enemy. That’s why she set a hidden personality as a watchdog of the plan, knowing she’d have to face curveballs she couldn’t foresee. Believe me, the plan proceeded anything but smoothly. There were a whole host of disasters transcendent Kira didn’t foresee. Van Hutten came from totally out of left field. Frey was an unexpected nightmare. So were Jake and his organization.” She lowered her eyes. “So was Jim Connelly’s death,” she added sadly.
Desh thought back to that moment in the woods, when Connelly had sacrificed himself for Kira, without hesitation. He had wondered then if his friend’s sacrifice had been worth it, and now he knew that it had been.
“The hidden part of me recognized there was a chance Jake would be assigned to the international effort to study the alien object,” continued Kira. “That’s why I planted a seed with him to call me if he ran into something big he couldn’t handle. At the time, I was a prisoner, and I was kicking myself, wondering why I had said it.”