“I’ll keep them closed,” he said obediently.
She licked his lips seductively, then took his hands and pressed them down against the bed and brought them together above his head.
“You are feeling naughty tonight.” His voice was breathless.
Derek crossed the room and leaned over the bed, pressed his left hand against Calista’s to hold Jeremy’s hands firmly in place, then slid the cloth over Jeremy’s nose and mouth.
He struggled, but Derek and Calista held him down securely.
“Yes, Jeremy, my dear.” As he faded into unconsciousness she gently stroked his cheek. “You have no idea how naughty I’m feeling.”
Part VI
The Three Laws
I wake up refreshed.
It’s been an incredibly eventful week, and I think all the stress, jet lag, and lack of sleep have finally caught up with me. When I check the clock I see it’s closing in on nine o’clock.
Though I suspect that by this time everyone, except for maybe Donnie and Lonnie, will be up, the house is quiet.
As I get dressed, everything from the last couple days revolves in a confusing swirl of memories and emotions through my mind: Emilio’s death, the hectic flights back home, chasing the pickup, the incident in the piranha tank, visiting the Hideaway, making up a card trick for Solomon.
Then, of course, meeting the Sprite-drinking Cammo dude, Fred Anders, here at my house.
Quite a week.
Though I feel pretty well recuperated, my boulder-smacked leg is still sore and my arm really stings — this has been the worst couple days of my life for being attacked by exotic animals. Cobras. Piranhas. Enough with all that.
After smearing some antibiotic on the bites, I make my way downstairs and find Xavier in the kitchen finishing a large bowl of pistachio nut ice cream. A box of Captain Crunch cereal and a gallon jug of 2 % milk sit beside it on the table.
“Morning, Xav.”
“Hey, Jev.”
“Pistachios today, huh?”
He holds up a spoonful of ice cream. “Fionna bought it for me yesterday. Nothing but the finest.”
“She’s taking good care of you.”
“Yeah, well, I know who butters my cake.”
I blink. “I think she’s rubbing off on you.”
“Hmm,” he says noncommittally.
“Where is everybody?”
“Sleeping in, I guess.” He points to the percolating coffeepot. “Charlene was down a few minutes ago, though. Put some java on. She mentioned she’s heading out in a bit to catch church before meeting with Agent Ratchford at eleven. I haven’t seen Fionna, but I think I heard the girls moving around. They may have been down already, I’m not sure. I just came in.”
I join him for a bowl of cereal. “Any word from Fred this morning?”
“Not since I got up, but last night around two he swung by my RV to return Betty to me. She was under a dumpster — that must have been nasty retrieving her, means a lot. Anyway, he told me he’d just dropped off the drive at the location the blackmailer arranged. At least up until that time the pictures weren’t posted yet. That’s all I know.”
“You two really hit it off.”
He shrugs. “First Cammo dude I ever met who wasn’t trying to arrest me.”
“No, he was trying to kidnap you — actually, he did.”
“True. But I’m a forgiving kind of guy. You never know what kind of strange people you’re gonna end up being friends with. Heck, I’m even friends with you.”
“I’m not going to make any smart comment about which one of us is the strange one.”
“Strange is in the eye of the beholder.”
“I won’t argue with that. Getting back to Fred, I suppose you picked his brain pretty thoroughly about Groom Lake.”
“Tried to, but apparently the military keeps its secrets pretty well hidden even from the Cammo dudes. He wasn’t able to tell me a whole lot that I didn’t already know.” He finishes the ice cream, licks off his spoon. “Did describe the road layout of the base, though.”
He pours himself a heaping bowl of Captain Crunch and has to use his hand to hold all the cereal in when he adds the milk.
We both eat in silence for a few minutes. I debate whether I should join Charlene for church. She goes at 9:30 nearly every week and hasn’t been pressuring me to join her, but I’ve definitely sensed that she’s pleased when I do.
It’s not that I’m purposely avoiding it, but ever since the death of my family, God and I have had an on-and-off relationship — or at least I have with him.
You can’t go through the trauma of having your wife murder your two boys and take her own life and not end up mired in questions about good and evil, about meaning, about whether God exists — and if he does, if he really cares.
Go through something like that and you’ll see how well trite answers and clichés really work out for you. And how hard it is to find solutions that actually do.
And now this week.
Tragedy, eternity, injustice — an awful lot has landed here in my lap. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to join Charlene and see if it would help me sort through things, at least a little bit.
Besides, if I go along today, I can join her for the meeting with Agent Ratchford.
An ulterior motive?
Maybe.
I’ll just call it an added incentive.
While Xavier and I wait for Charlene to return downstairs and for Fionna and the kids to appear, we get talking about what happened last night with Tomás, Solomon, and Fred, and eventually the conversation circles around to the transhumanism research that seems to be at the heart of everything that’s going on.
He goes for some grape juice from the fridge. “So. Artificial intelligence. What would it really mean for a machine to become self-aware? Think about the implications. If we don’t have a soul — let’s say for argument’s sake that we don’t — if all we are is a collection of biological systems and we can reverse engineer those, create them, maybe even improve on them nonbiologically through nanotechnology and synthetic biology, what essentially would be the difference between us and machines? Metaphysically speaking, that is.”
“Well, the key would be if we don’t have a soul.”
“But if you could upload someone’s consciousness onto a machine, would their soul live there too?”
“I have no idea.”
“We upload our consciousness and we can theoretically live as long as there’s electricity or batteries to keep the computer running. Continue learning, never grow any older, live forever, even survive a zombie apocalypse.”
“I like how you threw in the zombie survival perk.”
“Always a nice little side benefit of nonbiological existence.”
Strange scenarios come to mind — not so much about zombies, but about human consciousness being uploaded onto a computer. Do that, then place it in a robot. Make the robot look realistic. Destroy the computer or unplug it — would you be guilty of murder?
Is the essence of what makes us human found in our consciousness, or is it somehow tied to having an impermanent, transient body?
I finish my cereal, slide the bowl back. “So, just for argument’s sake, let’s say we have hundreds of millions of people’s consciousness existing on some sort of highly evolved Internet. What if someone sends a virus, wipes them all out? Is he the worst mass murderer in history or just a computer hacker?”
“It wouldn’t have to be a hacker. It could be a mistake. All of humanity — if society chooses to still use that word to describe what we are — could be wiped out in one tragic programming blunder, computer glitch, or inappropriate application of the machine’s protocol.”