The naval veteran inhales the salt air, swallowing back the bile rising from his gut.
Aboard the Goliath
Gunnar follows Simon Covah aft, then down a steel ladder to middle deck forward.
Within the small alcove is the impassable vault door.
“Sorceress, open your control chamber.”
IDENTIFICATION CODE REQUIRED.
“Covah-one, alpha-omega six-four-five-tango-four-six-five-nine.”
IDENTIFICATION CODE VERIFIED. VOICE IDENTIFICATION VERIFIED. YOU MAY ENTER CONTROL CHAMBER.
The vault door swings open majestically, revealing a dark chamber within.
Gunnar follows Covah inside, the door sealing shut behind them.
Ten paces and the deck becomes a steel catwalk. Middle deck forward is a double-hulled, self-contained tunnel-like compartment, its curved, watertight vault walls thirty feet across, rising twenty feet high. Dark and heavily air-conditioned, the fortresslike nerve center is ringed with electronics and equipped with its own primary and secondary power sources. Illuminating the chamber, running beneath the catwalk, are lengths of clear, plastic pipes. Within these man-made arteries flow a series of bioluminescent liquids, the elixirs color-coded lime green, phosphorescent orange, and electric blue.
Continuing forward, Gunnar and Covah arrive at the end of the compartment, a large cathedral-shaped alcove, at the center of which is a gigantic Lexan hourglass-shaped configuration radiating light like a bizarre aquarium.
“Say hello to Sorceress,” Covah announces with a rasp. “As you can see, the Chinese and I reconfigured quite a few things.”
The centerpiece, resembling a see-through version of a nuclear cooling tower, stands twenty feet high, its narrowing middle twelve feet in diameter. Mounted above and below to rubber support sleeves, the object extends down from the ceiling through a circular cutout in the walkway, continuing eight feet below the catwalk. A padded support rail encircles the object, further immobilizing it.
A spider’s web of plastic pipes originating from a series of perimetermounted generators feeds directly into inlets atop the glowing object. A similar configuration of pipes flows out of the bottom of the Lexan glass container, dispersing below the deck and out of sight.
Gunnar peers through the glass. Inside, the lime green, phosphorescent orange, and electric blue biochemical elixirs twist and contort like oil in a maelstrom. “Sorceress’s biochemical womb? It’s much larger than I imagined.”
Covah nods proudly. “We found that silicon-coated bacteria reproduced DNA within a womb this size at rates far exceeding even those found in nature. The vat’s solution feeds into millions of different column compartments, each one consisting of a series of chambers where the DNA is sequentially extracted from the bacteria in milliseconds. The bacteria are then fed into gold bead-packed filters as the algorithms are executed. The filters extract the potential solution strands, which are then read in magnetic resonance columns.” Covah points to a series of pipes feeding into an adjacent alcove of equipment. “The extracted information either gets shunted into synthesizers, where plasmidlike DNA is generated at lightning speed for data input, or goes back to the silicon-based hardware, where the last steps in processing convert the answers evolved by the bacteria into a form that we hear as the voice of Sorceress.”
“Incredible.”
“Yes. I believe even Dr. Goode would be proud.”
“Would she? I wonder.” A sudden, frightening thought. “Simon … the system’s self-replicating program—what did you pattern the physical concentration features after?”
“Only the most sophisticated features ever discovered—the very embryological processes found in Nature herself.”
“The life sequence?” Gunnar feels his insides tightening, his blood pressure rising. “Dammit, Simon—”
“Lab tests in China confirmed the cloned bacteria’s behavior became far more vigorous using this type of—”
“Vigorous?” Gunnar slams his palms against the padded rail in frustration. “The entire process grew out of control. Don’t you remember Dr. Goode’s warnings? We agreed never to use those parameters again.”
Covah’s demeanor darkens. “I agreed to nothing. I don’t work for Elizabeth Goode, I work for science.” He points to the vat, his voice cracking as it rises. “Look at it, Gunnar, swirling within that vat is the very elixir of life. Our primordial oceans once teemed with similar broths, only far less complex. At some point those chemical elixirs organized, their evolution no doubt stimulated by an outside catalyst. It was this single event that initiated the explosion of life on this planet. Now, two billion years later, we’ve created artificial intelligence using Nature’s own recipe … and you want me to curtail it?”
“You have to. Sorceress is evolving way too fast.”
“Nonsense.”
“What if the computer becomes cognizant of itself? You’ve read Damasio’s studies on consciousness. Self-awareness manifests itself in life-forms that have acquired sufficiently evolved and complex nervous systems—nervous systems that enable them to interact with the outside world. Sorceress isn’t just a computer, Simon, it’s a thinking machine designed to control the functions of a very sophisticated submarine. It’s interacting—”
“Gunnar—”
“Just listen! This isn’t just some sophisticated PC we’re dealing with. Goliath’s sensors enable Sorceress to function freely within its environment, just like any other life-form. And don’t forget what Damasio said about memory—the higher a life-form’s capacity for memory, the higher its potential state of self-awareness.”
“Damasio’s studies referred to animals, Gunnar, not machines. Sorceress cannot—”
Without warning, the sub ascends at a mountainous forty-five-degree angle, sending the two men sprawling on their backs, sliding backward down the catwalk. Lunging sideways, Gunnar grabs the base of the guardrail, then catches Simon by the wrist as he slides by.
Covah gasps for words. “Sorceress, report! Sorceress—”
The monstrous devilfish bursts forth from the depths, its steel torso flying halfway out of the water before plunging back into the frothy sea, its raylike wings striking the surface with a tremendous slap. The behemoth sinks into the valley created by its own weight, allowing its five churning propulsor engines to recatch the sea.
The dark skull of the leviathan plows across the surface of the Mediterranean like a mad bull.
“A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”
—Walter Gagehot
“I just started shooting. That’s it. I just did it for the fun of it.”
—Brenda Spencer, a sixteen-year-old high school student in San Diego, explaining why she opened fire at an elementary school in 1979, killing two children and injuring several more
CHAPTER 18