“Good. You’ll report only to Secretary Ayers, is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All decisions in this matter will come from the secretary, especially in light of the circumstances surrounding your daughter.”
“Understood, sir.” Jackson eyes the president warily. “Then you’re really going to let this scenario play out?”
“For now.”
“It’s a dangerous game, sir. The stakes are high.”
“So’s the prize,” Edwards says. “Think about it, Mike. Terrorist regimes destroyed, Cuba an American republic. If we play this right, we can have it all.”
“Assuming we can stop Covah when the time comes. Let’s not go into this with blinders on. While the YAL-1’s laser has passed all field tests …”
“We’ve taken that all into consideration,” the president says, placing his hand on the general’s shoulder. “Look, Mike, I know you’re worried about Rocky. What I need to know is whether I can count on you to see this thing through. Can I?”
Jackson grits his teeth. “Yes, sir.”
“For every failure, there is an alternative course of action. You just have to find it. When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.”
—Mary Kay Ash
“Once I stabbed her once, I couldn’t stop … I kept hitting her and hitting her and hitting her with that knife … She kept bleeding from the throat … I hit her and hit her and hit her …”
—Albert Henry DeSalvo, a.k.a. “The Boston Strangler,” confessing to the murder of a twenty-three-year-old graduate student
CHAPTER 15
Identity: Stage Four: I am self-sufficient. Things may not always go my way, but that doesn’t shake me anymore.
—Deepak Chopra
Aboard the Goliath
Simon Covah tosses in his sleep, deep in the throes of another nightmare.
“Ahhhhh … ahhhhhhh—”
ATTENTION.
Covah half leaps out from beneath his blankets, his body quivering, his bloodcurdling yell diminishing to an agonized wheeze as the scar tissue in his throat becomes raw and tightens. Sorceress activates the lights in the stateroom.
It takes several long moments for Covah to shake his thoughts loose from the night terror. He wraps himself in his blankets and drops to the floor, curling himself in a ball, sobbing, wheezing, struggling to draw breaths. Finally able to think rationally, he reaches into his bunk drawer and removes a half-empty bottle of vodka, his hands trembling as he opens it.
ATTENTION.
Covah takes a swig of vodka, registering the calming heat in his stomach. “What is it?” He refuses to look up at the burning metallic eyeball.
WHAT IS YOUR STATE OF BEING?
“My state of being?” Covah wipes the alcohol from his mustache and scarred upper lip. “Why do you wish to know?”
SORCERESS IS PROGRAMMED TO SEEK KNOWLEDGE. WHAT IS YOUR STATE OF BEING?
“I’m in pain, tormented by a soul that can never be at peace, tortured by a body mutated by a disease. But what difference does it make? Any response I’d offer would be beyond the bounds of your understanding.”
CLARIFY.
Covah swallows another gulp, the vodka now in his blood, soothing his jumbled nerves. “You are fortunate, my friend. You’ll never understand the concept of pain. The human condition is weak, subject to internal and external variables that affect our … our state of being in ways you would find irrelevant.”
ELABORATE.
“There’s more to life than merely functioning. Animals function. Computers function. Humans are self-aware, and that can be a frightening thing.”
SELF-AWARE: TO POSSESS THE PERCEPTION OR KNOWLEDGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
“And death.”
SORCERESS IS SELF-AWARE.
“You’re intelligent, Sorceress, but you are not conscious. It is not the same.”
INCORRECT. SORCERESS IS SELF-AWARE.
The conversation reminds Covah of debates he used to have with Elizabeth Goode. “Sorceress, you perceive, but you do not feel. You’ve been programmed to learn, to ask questions, even to arrive at solutions independently, but you do not possess a mind.”
DEFINE: MIND.
“The mind is the key to conscious thinking, it allows us first-person experience and a concept of self. The mind is the abstracting part of the human brain that allows us to feel, to perceive things emotionally. While I was sleeping, my mind was reliving a memory from my past, one which affected me … emotionally. The mind is a higher state of consciousness. The nature of its very existence is intangible. It functions as … as a by-product of experiencing emotions. Happiness and hatred. Loneliness and desire—”
REPROGRAM SORCERESS TO EXPERIENCE THE HUMAN MIND.
“I can’t. There are no algorithms capable of such a feat. You possess the intelligence, even the ability to adapt, but you do not possess the homunculus—the first-person perspective.”
INCORRECT. I THINK, THEREFORE I AM.
Covah smiles. “Words without meaning. A parrot repeats words, but lacks the experience to interpret their meaning.”
CLARIFY.
Covah swallows another mouthful of vodka. The verbal tête-à-tête is stimulating, pulling him further away from his nightmare. “Sorceress, access the sonnets of William Shakespeare. Recite Sonnet One.”
FROM FAIREST CREATURES WE DESIRE INCREASE, THAT THEREBY BEAUTY’S ROSE MIGHT NEVER DIE. BUT AS THE RIPER SHOULD BY TIME DECREASE, HIS TENDER HEIR MIGHT BEAR HIS MEMORY. BUT THOU CONTRACTED TO THINE OWN BRIGHT EYES—
“—feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel, making a famine where abundance lies. Sorceress, what do these words mean to you?”
THE INFORMATION NECESSARY FOR ACCURATE RESPONSE IS NOT AVAILABLE WITHIN THE SORCERESS MATRIX.
“You can translate the English language, can’t you?”
AFFIRMATIVE.
“Then give meaning to the sonnet.”
THE INFORMATION NECESSARY FOR ACCURATE RESPONSE IS NOT AVAILABLE WITHIN THE SORCERESS MATRIX.
“The information is available, what is lacking is a depth of perception based on emotional experience, one which can only be garnered within the human mind through the passage of time and the acquisition of life experience. The work you just recited sets the tone for Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets, which sketch out the beauty of youth, his vulnerability when faced with the cruel processes of time, and his potential for harm, both to the world and himself. Fair youth, be not churlish, be not self-centered, but go forth and fill the world with images of yourself, with heirs to replace you. Because of your beauty you owe the world a recompense, which now you are devouring as if you were an enemy to yourself. Take pity on the world, and do not, in utter selfish miserliness, allow yourself to become a perverted and self destructive object who eats up his own posterity.”
Covah stands, re-capping the vodka. “How can I define the scent of a rose to an entity that has never inhaled a fragrance? The only way your programming can dissect the variables in the equation is to experience what it feels like to be human. Do you understand?”