Blasphemy wf-2 Read online

  “What you ask isn’t important—just keep the malware talking. Rae’s going to need a steady output to trace this thing. Don’t get hung up asking long or complicated questions—keep them short. Kate, if Wyman falters or runs out of questions, you be ready to jump in. We can’t waste a second.”

  Ford walked over to her workstation. She rose, offered him the seat. He laid a hand on her shoulder. He bent down, as if to examine the screen. “Hello,” he whispered, taking her hand and squeezing it.

  “Hi.”

  Kate hesitated, and then said, sotto voce, “Promise me, Wyman, that no matter what happens here— no matter what— we’re going to start over again. You and me. Promise me that . . . what happened on our ride out there on the mesa wasn’t just a one-time thing.” Her face was intensely flushed. She bent down to hide it, her black hair hanging down like a curtain.

  He gave her hand a squeeze. “I promise.”

  Hazelius had finished discussing various details with certain team members, and he returned to the center of the Bridge. He cast his flashing blue eyes across the group. “I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again. We’re sailing into unknown waters. I won’t kid you: what we’re about to do is dangerous. There’s no alternative: our backs are against the wall. We’re going to find this logic bomb and destroy it. Tonight.”

  In the long silence that followed, the singing of the machine rose and fell.

  “We’re going to be out of touch with the outside world for a few hours,” he said. His fierce eye ranged about the room. “Any questions?”

  “Um, I do.” Julie Thibodeaux responded. Her face was slick with sweat, and the dark circles under her eyes seemed almost translucent. Her hair was long and stringy. It shook as she moved.

  Hazelius gazed at her. “Yes?”

  “I—” She faltered.

  Hazelius arched his eyebrows, waiting. She pushed her chair back suddenly and rose. The rollers snagged on the carpet, causing her to stumble. “This is insane,” she said, her voice loud. “We’ve got a warm magnet, an unstable computer, malware— and now we’re going to pump a few hundred megawatts of power into the machine? You’re going to blow the shit out of this whole mountain. You can count me out.”

  Hazelius’s glance flickered briefly toward Wardlaw, then back to Thibodeaux.

  “I’m afraid it’s too late, Julie.”

  “What do you mean, too late?” she yelled. “I’m out of here.”

  “The Bunker doors are closed, locked, and sealed. You know the drill.”

  “Bullshit. Ford just came in.”

  “By previous arrangement. Now, no one can leave until dawn. Not even me. It’s part of the security arrangement.”

  “Bullcrap. What if there were a fire, an accident?” She stood defiantly, her body quivering.

  “The only person with the security codes who can open the door before dawn is Tony. It’s his decision as SIO. Tony?”

  “No one can leave,” said Wardlaw stolidly.

  “I refuse to accept that answer,” she said, her voice rising in panic.

  “I’m afraid you must,” said Hazelius.

  “Tony. I want out, now, goddamn you.” Her voice rode up toward the edge of a scream.

  “I’m sorry,” Wardlaw said.

  She rushed at him, all five feet three inches of her. He let her come on. She raised her fists and he caught them neatly as she flung herself on him.

  “Let me go, you bastard!” She twisted and turned helplessly.

  “Easy, now.”

  “I’m not going to die for some machine!” She slumped against him and began to sob.

  Ford looked on incredulously. “If she wants out, let her out.”

  Wardlaw gave him a hostile stare. “It’s against protocol.”

  “She’s no security risk. Look at her—she’s falling apart.”

  “The rules are there for a reason,” said Wardlaw. “No one leaves Isabella during a run except in the case of a life-threatening emergency.”

  Ford turned to Hazelius. “This isn’t right.” He looked around. “Surely the rest of you agree.” But instead of agreement, he saw uncertainty. Fear. “You can’t keep her here against her will.”

  Until now he hadn’t realized how much they had fallen under Hazelius’s spell. “Kate?” He turned to her. “You know this is wrong.”

  “Wyman, we all signed on to the rules. Even her.”

  Hazelius walked over to Thibodeaux and nodded to Wardlaw. The SIO released her into Hazelius’s arms. She tried to break free but he held her, firmly but gently. Her sobs began to subside to whimpers and gulps. He cradled her gently, almost lovingly. She leaned into his chest, crying softly, like a little girl. Hazelius patted and stroked the back of her head and brushed away her tears with a thumb, all the while murmuring into her ear. A few minutes passed and she calmed down.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  He patted her, smoothing her hair, running his hands sensually over her plump back. “We need you, Julie. I need you. We can’t do it without you. You know that.”

  She nodded, sniffed. “I lost it. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

  He held her until she was quiet. When he released her, she stepped back, eyes on the floor.

  “Julie, stay here with me. You’ll be safe—I promise.”

  She nodded again.

  Ford stared after her in amazement, until he noticed Hazelius looking at him with a sad, kind face. “Are we all right now, Wyman?”

  Ford met the blue eyes and would not speak.

  42

  IN HIS TRAILER, PASTOR RUSS EDDY sat in front of the twenty-inch screen on his iMac. The live Webcast of Roundtable America had just ended. Eddy’s brain was afire, his soul burning, the words of Reverend Spates still reverberating in his mind. He, Russell Eddy, was the “devout Christian on-site” who had exposed the Isabella project. “A pastor just like me,” Reverend Spates had said to millions. It was Eddy who had gathered the critical information at great personal risk, guided by the invisible hand of the Lord. These were not normal times. The righteous wrath of the Lord, with all its immense power, was surely coming. Not even the rocks would hide the pagan scientists from the vengeance of the Almighty Lord.

  Eddy sat before the quiet blue screen, his mind reeling with the glory of God. The grand design was starting to show its outlines. God’s plan for him. It all started with the death of the Indian, struck down by God’s own hand, a direct sign to Eddy of His coming fury. The end was upon them. “For the great day of His wrath has come, and who shall be able to stand?”

  Slowly, Eddy’s consciousness drifted back to the trailer. It was so quiet in the shabby bedroom—as if nothing had happened at all. Yet the world had changed. God’s plan for him stood revealed. But what was the next step? What did God intend him to do?

  A sign . . . he needed a sign. He clasped his Bible, his hands trembling with emotion. God would show him what to do.

  He laid the book spine down and let it fall open where it would. The well-worn pages whiffled past until almost the end, where they settled flat, open to the book of Revelation. His eye fell randomly on a sentence: “And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies . . .”

  His spine seemed to contract with the chill. The passage was one of the clearest and most unambiguous references to the Antichrist in the entire Bible.

  Confirmation.

  43

  EVEN WITH THE TENSION IN THE room, Ford thought, the run-up to the top of the power spectrum was even duller the second time around. By ten o’clock, Isabella reached 99.5 percent power. Everything was happening as before: the resonance, the hole in space-time, the strange image condensing in the center of the Visualizer. Isabella hummed; the mountain vibrated.

  As if on schedule, the Visualizer went blank and the first words appeared.

  We speak again.

  “Go to it, Wyman,” Hazelius said.

  Ford typed, Tell me all about yourself. He coul
d feel Kate leaning over behind him, watching him work.

  I can no more explain to you who I am than you could explain to a beetle who you are.

  “Rae?” Hazelius asked. “Are you getting it?”

  “I’m trolling.”

  Try anyway, Ford wrote.

  I will explain instead why you cannot understand me.

  “George,” said Hazelius, “are you following this?”

  “I am,” said Innes, delighted to be consulted. “It’s clever—telling us we won’t understand is a way of avoiding being tripped up by detail.”

  Go ahead, typed Ford.

  You inhabit a world scaled midway between the Planck length and the diameter of the universe.

  “Seems to be a bot program,” said Edelstein, examining the output on a screen. “It copies itself to another location, erases the original and covers its tracks.”

  “Yeah,” said Chen, “and I’ve got a bunch of hungry bot-wolves roaming Isabella, looking for it.”

  Your brain was exquisitely fine-tuned to manipulate your world—not to comprehend its fundamental reality. You evolved to throw rocks, not quarks.

  “I’m on its trail!” Chen cried. She hunched over the keyboard, like a chef over a hot stove, working maniacally. Code was racing by on four flat panels in front of her.

  “Main computer’s crashing,” said Edelstein calmly. “Switching control of Isabella over to the backup servers.”

  As a result of your evolution, you see the world in fundamentally erroneous ways. For example, you believe yourselves to occupy a three-dimensional space in which separate objects trace smoothly predictable arcs marked by something you call time. This is what you call reality.

  “Switchover complete.”

  “Cut the power to the main computer.”

  “Wait,” said Dolby sharply. “That wasn’t the plan.”

  “We want to make sure the malware isn’t in there. Pull the plug, Alan.”

  Edelstein smiled coldly and turned back to the computer.

  “Jesus Christ, wait—!” Dolby leapt up, but it was too late.

  “Done,” Edelstein said, with a sharp rap on the keyboard.

  Half the peripheral screens went blank. Dolby stood, swaying, uncertain. A moment went by. Nothing happened. Isabella continued to hum along.

  “It worked,” said Edelstein. “Ken, you can relax.”

  Dolby flashed him an annoyed look and settled back down to his workstation.

  Are you saying, Ford typed, that our reality is an illusion?

  Yes. Natural selection has given you the illusion that you understand fundamental reality. But you do not. How could you? Do beetles understand fundamental reality? Do chimpanzees? You are an animal like them. You evolved like them, you reproduce like them, you have the same basic neural structures. You differ from the chimpanzee by a mere two hundred genes. How could that minuscule difference enable you to comprehend the universe when the chimpanzee cannot even comprehend a grain of sand?

  “I swear,” Chen cried, “the data’s streaming out of CZero again!”

  “Impossible,” said Hazelius. “The malware’s hiding in a detector. Force-quit and restart the detector processors, one at a time.”

  “I’ll try.”

  If our conversation is to be fruitful, you must abandon all hope of understanding me.

  “More clever obfuscation,” said Innes. “It’s basically saying nothing.”

  Ford felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. Kate asked, “May I take over for a moment?”

  He dropped his hands from the keyboard and moved over. Kate sat down.

  What are our illusions? she typed.

  You evolved to see the world as being made up of discrete objects. That is not so. From the first moment of creation, all was entangled. What you call space and time are merely emergent properties of a deeper underlying reality. In that reality, there is no separateness. There is no time. There is no space. All is one.

  Explain, Kate typed.

  Your own theory of quantum mechanics, incorrect as it is, touches on the deep truth that the universe is unitary.

  All well and good, Kate typed, but how does this matter in our own lives today?

  It matters a great deal. You think of yourself as an “individual person,” with a unique and separate mind. You think you are born and you think you die. All your life you feel separate and alone. Sometimes desperately so. You fear death because you fear the loss of individuality. All this is illusion. You, he, she, those things around you living or not, the stars and galaxies, the empty space in between—these are not distinct, separate objects. All is fundamentally entangled. Birth and death, pain and suffering, love and hate, good and evil, are all illusive. They are atavisms of the evolutionary process. They do not exist in reality.

  So it’s just like the Buddhists believe, that all is illusion?

  Not at all. There is an absolute truth, a reality. But a mere glimpse of this reality would break a human mind.

  Suddenly Edelstein, who had abandoned his computer console, appeared behind Ford and Mercer.

  “Alan, why are you leaving your station—?” Hazelius began.

  “If you’re God,” said Edelstein with a half smile on his face, hands clasped behind his back, strolling along in front of the Visualizer, “let’s dispense with the typing. You should be able to hear me.”

  Loud and clear, came the response on the Visualizer.

  “We’ve got a hidden mike in here,” said Hazelius. “Melissa, get on it. Hunt it down.”

  “You bet.”

  Edelstein went on, unperturbed. “You say, ‘all is unitary’? We have a numbering system: one, two, three—and in this way I refute your statement.”

  One, two, three . . . Another illusion. There is no enumerability.

  “This is mathematical sophistry,” said Edelstein, growing annoyed. “No enumerability—I just disproved it by counting.” He held up his hand. “An-other disproof: I give you the integer five!”

  You give me a hand with five fingers, not the integer five. Your number system has no independent existence in the real world. It is nothing more than a sophisticated metaphor.

  “I’d like to hear your proof of that ridiculous conjecture.”

  Pick a number at random on the real number line: with probability one you have picked a number that has no name, has no definition, and cannot be computed or written down, even if the whole universe were put to the task. This problem extends to allegedly definable numbers such as pi or the square root of two. With a computer the size of the universe running an infinite amount of time, you could not calculate either number exactly. Tell me, Edelstein: How then can such numbers be said to exist? How can the circle or the square, from which these two numbers derive, exist? How can dimensional space exist, then, if it cannot be measured? You, Edelstein, are like a monkey who, with heroic mental effort, has figured out how to count to three. You find four pebbles and think you have discovered infinity.

  Ford had lost the thread of the argument, but he was startled to see Edelstein’s face pale, shocked into silence, as if the mathematician had understood something that staggered him.

  “Is that so?” cried Hazelius, stepping down from the Bridge and brushing Edelstein aside. He placed himself squarely in front of the screen. “You talk a fine streak, you boast that even the word ‘God’ is inadequate to describe your greatness. All right, then—prove it. Prove you’re God.”

  “Don’t,” said Kate. “Don’t ask that.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “You just might get what you ask for.”

  “Fat chance.” He turned back to the machine. “Did you hear me?Prove you’re God.”

  There was a silence, and then the answer appeared on the screen: You construct the proof, Hazelius. But I warn you, this is the last test to which I will submit. We have important business and very little time.

  “You asked for it.”

  “Wait,” said Kate.

  Haze
lius turned to her.

  “Gregory, if you have to do this, do it right. Make it count . There can’t be any room for doubt or ambiguity. Ask it something that only you know— only you, and no one else in the entire world. Something personal. Your deepest, most private secret. Something only God— the real God— could possibly know.”

  “Yes, Kate. That’s quite right.” He thought for a long minute, and then spoke quietly. “All right. I’ve got it.”

  Silence.

  Everyone had stopped their tasks.

  Hazelius turned toward the Visualizer. He spoke calmly and quietly. “My wife, Astrid, was pregnant when she died. We had just found out. Nobody else knew of her pregnancy. Nobody . Here is your test: tell me the name we chose for our child.”

  Another silence, filled only by the ethereal singing of the detectors. The screen remained blank. The seconds crawled by.

  Hazelius snorted. “Well, that settles it. If anyone had any doubts.”

  And then, as if from a great distance, a name swam into focus on the screen.

  Albert Leibniz Gund Hazelius, if it was a boy.

  Hazelius remained still, his face expressionless. Everyone stared at him, awaiting a denial that did not come.

  “And if it was a girl?” Edelstein cried, stepping toward the screen. “What if it was a girl? What would the name have been?”

  Rosalind Curie Gund Hazelius.

  Ford stared in utter astonishment as Hazelius folded to the floor, as slowly and gently as if he had fallen asleep.

  44

  BY THE TIME STANTON LOCKWOOD REACHED the Oval Office for the emergency meeting, the president was pacing the center of the room like a caged lion. Roger Morton, his chief of staff, and the ubiquitous campaign chief Gordon Galdone were standing on either side of his pacing ground, like referees. His ever-silent secretary, Jean, clutched her steno book primly. Lockwood was surprised to see the president’s National Security Advisor in video conference, split-screened on a flat panel display with Jack Strand, the Director of the FBI.

  “Stanton.” The president came over and grasped his hand. “Glad you could get here at such short notice.”

  “Of course, Mr. President.”

  “Have a seat.”

  Lockwood sat while the president continued to stand. “Stan, I called this little meeting because we’ve got some shit going on down there in Arizona with the Isabella project that Jack’s just brought to my attention. Around eight o’clock Mountain Daylight Time all communications to and from Isabella were cut off. From all of Red Mesa, even. The DOE Offsite Project Manager tried to raise them on the secure lines, by open cell lines, even by regular land-lines. No luck. Isabella is running at full power and it seems the team is below, in the Bunker, totally cut off. The situation was vetted up the ladder and just came to the attention of Director Strand—who informed me.”