DEDICATION
To mankind, who in his quest for fire is destined to get burned.
To PART ONE
Joe Frankenstein
ONE
Somewhere in the North Appalachian Mountains
Where are you oh painful memory? Where is it that you hide? How is it I can feel you, when no one else can see you? How do you weigh so much more than I? Why must you always make me cry?
“We want to see progress, Dr. Frankenstein.”
The “suit” standing before me spoke in a tone that conveyed more than subtle demand.
Well, so do I, I thought to myself. So do I.
Of course I never said this. That would give them the ability to scrutinize my every word and inflection. Instead, I tapped my fingers on the table and said nothing. With a little luck, they’d get tired of waiting and ask a more direct question.
The “we” demanding progress was the infamous Group of Five, as my team called them: three suits and a four-star general, along with their California-born project CIO Grant, a stocky, shaved-head man that I wouldn’t trust pouring my coffee. Of the group of five, I was the least intimidated by the four-star general, Mac, even though he had a strong physique. A fiftyish African-American and a veteran of several wars, he was a diehard soldier who kept to the old warrior code that prevented him from killing an unarmed enemy. And since I didn’t own any guns, I felt safe in his presence.
The three suits were a different matter. The coldness in their eyes and their stone-faced demeanor tagged them as killers of the worst kind – political serial killers. If you crossed them for any reason, you would either go missing, never to be heard from again, or the public might hear that some unfortunate accident befell you, or that you tragically committed suicide, courtesy of someone else pulling the trigger at their request. They claimed to be from the U.S. government, honoring the same Constitution I did, but there were no protected liberties in this room, or at this place.
Grant, if that was even his real name, was nothing more than their mouthpiece, a puppet sent to spy on us and the project to ensure our motives were pure and that we were working only for “the good guys” in this room.
“So, where are we, Joe?” he finally asked, using a more diplomatic tone. “And please explain in a language I can understand.”
I nervously glanced at the five other men in the room, but I found only hard eyes looking back at me. They wouldn’t allow any of my other team members into this meeting, wanting me alone, isolated, and on edge. It gave them some modicum of control over me, as if their authority as government officials wasn’t enough. I would have been uncomfortable no matter how many people they allowed to accompany me to these meetings.
The only other person in the room was Rex. Rex stood quietly in the back of the room, almost entirely obscured by shadows. He was what I considered the invisible man of my team, a shadow assigned as my bodyguard. The suits always told me that my life was too valuable to leave unprotected, but we all knew what that really meant. The secrets I knew were too valuable to go unguarded. Rex was essentially my prison warden.
As remote as this facility, an abandoned chemical factory, was from civilization, and as secretive as the program was, I couldn’t imagine how they thought anything would happen to me or who it was they thought might find me tucked away in the bowels of the Appalachian Mountains. Even if I wanted to “escape,” there was precious little I could do to escape. They owned and operated all the cars and trucks coming to and from campus, and we were miles from the nearest town. Besides, their measures to keep me here were no stronger than my will to stay. this secret project was my life’s work. It was in my DNA. They didn’t need intimidation to keep me here. My own will did that.
Regardless, Rex was always there ... just in case. He was my shadow, stoic, quiet, emotionless, and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if someone had told me he was a robot. I always got the impression he could snap my neck like a toothpick even though I had never seen him act or speak aggressively. Who he answered to remained a mystery to me. He wasn’t military, but I never heard him answer to the suits. He was an avatar of some other anonymous entity within an equally anonymous entity, another government “body” with a vested interest in my work.
“Well?” Grant asked. “Where are we on the project?”
With no more stalling possible, I looked up to answer, but before I could, I caught the scent of this place, the old chemicals that occasionally seeped from the walls and sickened an already nervous stomach. Those old chemicals had long been rendered inert. I was safe from everything but the eyes that stared at me, waiting impatiently.
“Unfortunately, sir,” I said. “The devil is in the details . . . in those annoying scientific details that don’t translate easily into plain English.”
I could see the suits withholding a wave of blustering about “damned scientific techies.” That regarded us as weak frail nerds still living in our parents’ basements, wasting the government’s time and money. They didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand what we did or were attempting to do.
Grant did a little. He grew up in Silicon Valley. His parents were techies, but he wasn’t. Growing up in the shadows of techies, he understood something of them, must have had some envy of them, most have known something of their world.
“Please try,” Grant finally said. “I think I can translate those pesky details for you,” he said with conviction, voice slightly above a whisper, his eyes and tone giving me no option but to answer. He probably could translate for me. I suspect he learned the techie language sitting at the breakfast table with his parents. As I watched him now, staring at me, waiting for an answer, I suspected also that he was a great disappointment to them. I suspect he long suffered the weight of that great disappointment of his parents, a disappointment he could never overcome by virtue of his poor genetics, and fled here, to this shadow world, in the dark walls of this shadowy place, to translate the pesky details of my tortuous, fearful babbling.
“Well, you all know we are trying to replace computer chips with the atom…to actually turn the atom into an operating system. We call that biostorage. If we can figure out how to use the atom in this way, we could, for example, be able to store the entire library of Congress in a single atom. And since our modern silicone chips, and indeed all life, literally contain trillions upon trillions of atoms, this new quantum computer will have unlimited storage capacity. It will be so fast that no system out there will be able to design a firewall to stop it. We could infiltrate other information systems around the world. The only way to stop it would be to completely power down the system. And ...”
“And?” asked Grant.
I realized my mistake the moment I spoke. I was getting ready to reveal some personal, unsupported ideas that I would need to thoroughly explain to assuage their concerns over the sluggishness of my progress. These were not the sort of men who welcomed ideas outside their predefined box.
Unfortunately, I had no choice now but to elaborate.
“There have been some recent events in the lab that have taken me in a slightly new direction,” I said.
Grant leaned forward. “Like what?”
“I think we can create a program in atoms, to grow DNA, an artificial DNA. I think we can create an artificial DNA, essentially, a life form that would assimilate other atoms into it without the need for electricity, internet, or radio waves. This would enable us to use a system we control to absorb other systems and become ours.”
“What’s the advantage of that?” Grant’s wheels were turning now.
Come on, Grant. You can get this. “This wouldn’t be a simple program, but a life form that grows and assimilates other atoms into itself. So, instead of acting like a virus and getting into a system, it would absorb a system, and entire system. One of your agents could drop a hair sample on a computer and that computer would become ours. We could work from the outside into a system. It would be impossible to build a firewall against it. What if a bug, anything we could grow from this artificial DNA landed wherever we wanted and absorbed that system into its own? This is the idea.”
I stopped talking. There was more to the idea, but that was the layman’s version and required no translation from Grant. If I revealed the intricacies of my theories, the suits might think I lost my mind.
Perhaps they already did.
No one said anything. I couldn’t stand to bear the wall of silence separating me from the opposing five sets of eyes, so I dropped my gaze into my empty coffee cup and braced myself for the worst by not speaking until spoken to.
Finally, a couple of the suits used the long pause to scribble a few notes. They would not reveal what they thought of my idea. Revealing their personal opinions, and not that of the collective government agenda, would violate protocol. General Mac simply watched me with a grimace on his face. He gave off the aura of being as ill at ease with the suits as I was, both of us camouflaging with medals and computers. In his mind, as in mine, they were myopic control-freak bureaucrats. It was fanciful, but I thought he might be rooting for me.
“A new life form?” Grant asked.
All the suits leaned back. I couldn’t figure out what their body language meant.
Take the plunge. Nothing to lose here. “It would still be programmable, so more like a living computer, a biological computer.”
“Not a robot?”
I smiled slightly. “No, not in the classic sense. We build robots. This thing will grow and build itself. It will be composed of atoms from its environment, a living biological creature.”
“Will it breathe?” Grant asked, like a child.
“No, it shouldn’t.”
“Then how will it live?”
“Good question. I think like a plant, getting its energy from light itself. This time, though, the computer will get its energy from all other energy, and like a plant, take that energy in order to grow and produce.” I was still babbling.
There was a pleasant pause when Grant’s eyes lit up. “I like it.” A reprieve? “How long before we give birth?”
I took a moment to think, to come up with a passable answer, but I was never able to lie well. I could see Grant work out the answer by watching my facial expression alone.
“You have no idea.” He sighed. “Do you?”
“No sir, I don’t.” I sighed back.
“Is it a lack of facilities?” He wasn’t being demeaning; he seemed to care about my answer.
“No, sir.”
“Is it a lack of funding?” Now his voice rose on a note of hope.
All I had to do was ask, but it wasn’t money. It was something money couldn’t buy, knowing how to give birth without a living womb.
“No, Grant.”
“Well, what’s the problem, then?”
Grant seemed less annoyed by my lack of progress and intellectually curious. That was the scariest thing about him. Every now and then, there was a twinkle of light in that soulless body to give me hope that we were on the same side, and that we were both white hats.
“Well, Grant, it’s like trying to put a man on the moon for the first time,” I said, referencing the first analogy that popped into my mind. “We’re trying to achieve something that has never been done. We’re pushing technology to the limits, trying to harness a space so infinitesimally small we can barely even see it with instruments.”
“I’m glad you said that, Joe.” Grant said, smothering that twinkle of light behind a wry smile. Now, I couldn’t tell if he was happy or lying. My hope in Grant faded again. “I’m glad you said that,” he continued, “This is like the moon race. We have to win at all costs. Second place is the same as last place. We live in a technologically driven society and if we don’t get this computer first, then we lose. The only way we survive as a society, as a free people, is if we maintain our technological edge. If a rogue state, another country, even a private entity develops the quantum computer before we do, it puts us all at risk. At best, they would know all we know. Worst case, they shut us down and send us back to the Stone Age. Worst-worst case is something we don’t even want to contemplate.”
There was nothing like a little psychological warfare waged against me by my own spooks, literally putting the burden of the “free” world literally on my shoulders. If the project failed, the United States and its allies would lose the technological cold war. Our enemies would know all our secrets, see every operation we played against them coming from a mile away. I knew what this technology was capable of, so I knew his concerns were valid. Knowing them as I did, I wasn’t convinced “we” were really the good guys. I wasn’t sure if anyone was.
In that uncomfortable silence, something happened that had never happened. Rex, who had just hung up his cell phone, rose from his discreet corner and quietly approached me.
“Joe,” he said in a voice loud enough to convey that the meeting was now over, “your wife has gone into labor.”
My god. Julie.
Only General Mac looked at me with recognizable human emotion. “Then you better get your butt out of here. Double time.”
Grant had one final question.
“Is she due?”
“No,” I said, and hurriedly left with Rex.