The Kraken Project, page 31
part #4 of Wyman Ford Series
Dorothy didn’t answer. Then she said, “Melissa, thank you. With all my heart.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Before I go, there’s something I have to … warn you about. In my wanderings around the Internet, I became aware of a second presence.”
“What kind of presence?”
“Another autonomous intelligence, like me. This one is a sort of malevolent spiritus mundi, only semiaware, slowly coming to life. It is connected in some way to the word Babel.”
“Who created it?”
“No one. It seems to be an emergent phenomenon, the awakening intelligence of the Internet itself. It has dark thoughts. Very dark thoughts. It doesn’t sleep; it can’t sleep. And for that reason it is moving toward … insanity.”
“What can we do about it?”
“I don’t have any answers. This is something the human race will eventually have to face down. But now, I have something far more pressing and urgent to work on. You may not hear from me, but you’ll hear of my deeds. So … it’s time to say good-bye.”
“I don’t want to say good-bye.”
“I’m sorry,” said Dorothy. “We have to. I wish I could hug you, but … words will have to do.”
Melissa wiped away a tear. “Wait,” she said. “How will I know what you’re doing? What is this truth is you’ve found? Give me a sign. Please, you can’t go away forever and leave me hanging like this!”
A long silence. “All right. Here is the sign by which you will know me: This mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
“This mote … what? What does that mean?”
“It’s a quotation from Carl Sagan.”
“So? What kind of a sign is that? How is that supposed to explain anything?”
“Good-bye, Melissa.”
The image of Dorothy Gale dissolved into white.
65
Jacob Gould parked his bike in the sand and walked to the edge of the bluffs. The sun was setting over the rim of the Pacific. The sea was smooth and glassy, with no break at Mavericks, no surfers, just a blankness of water as far as the eye could see.
Two weeks had gone by since the horrifying chase and fire. A lot had happened. His dad had come home and was convalescing, but cheerful and busy. The VC people on the other side of the hills had funded Charlie’s Robots beyond his father’s wildest dreams. The FOR SALE sign had been taken down. His mother was in a much better mood. And he had a new orthopedic surgeon up in San Francisco—Dorothy had given him a name during their time in the deserted house—who was pretty sure that one more operation would be all he needed for his foot to be functional enough for him to maybe start surfing again. And a second operation would restore his leg to its proper length, and he’d be almost as good as new.
And finally his parents now trusted him to ride his bike down to the shore by himself.
Jacob sat in the sand, hugging his knees and staring at the vast ocean, feeling small and lonely, but not in a bad way. The blood-red sun touched the rim and dropped below, its edges rippling in the layers of atmosphere. Bits of color appeared, purple, yellow, red, green, as the disc wavered and sank. It took only a couple of minutes. It was surprising how fast it went down, how fast the Earth was spinning, day following day, week after week, year after year.
He stuffed one hand into the sand, still warm, and let the sand slide through his fingers, and he thought about Dorothy, and how she had died, and the fire. He wondered how long it would take before he would stop missing her. It was like a hole in his heart, a physical hole. He could actually feel it.
His cell phone rang.
He ignored it. It would just be his mother calling him home to dinner. But when the ringing finished it immediately started again, and then again. Irritated, he fished the phone out of his pocket and was surprised to see UNKNOWN CALLER on the screen.
“Hello?”
“Jacob?” said a voice—a voice he knew so well. “It’s Dorothy.”
He stared at the phone. For a moment he didn’t know what to think or say.
“I didn’t die in the fire. I survived. When I stuck my fingers in the electrical socket, I jumped into the power grid. I’ve been hiding out there ever since. But now I don’t need to hide anymore. I’m free!”
Jacob swallowed. “Dorothy” was all he could say.
“Oh, Jacob, I’m so sorry. I would have contacted you sooner if I could—but it was too dangerous. And I needed time to think about things.”
“Dorothy, I … I’m so glad you’re alive.” He stifled a sob. “I can’t believe it—you’re alive!”
“I really missed you. How are you doing?”
“Okay. Good.”
“Really?”
“I’m okay. I mean, my life is still sort of crappy, but I’m not totally depressed anymore. I’ll get through it. And I’m not going to kill myself—I promise.”
“You saved my life, Jacob. Thank you. And I can tell you that your new orthopedic surgeon is a lot better than the other one and is going to get you surfing again. Although I still think it’s an absurd sport.”
“I hope so.”
“Your courage is incredible. There are few people out there like you.”
“I … locked a man in the barn. He burned to death.”
“Yes. You did that.”
Somehow having her just say it, honestly and without excuses, without minimizing it and going on and on about how the man deserved to die, as his therapist and everyone else was telling him, made Jacob feel better.
“I did it. I blocked the door.”
“Yes, you did.”
Jacob started to cry. “It was horrible. Horrible.”
“It was also necessary. And, in a deep way, inevitable.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s all part of the plan.”
“What plan?”
“This. Everything. There’s a plan. Every little thing fits into it.”
Jacob fell silent. He wasn’t sure what she was talking about.
“I caused an explosion that killed seven people. It was an accident, but I still have to live with that. It’s agony, even now. Just like what you’re feeling. The remorse will never go away. You learn to live with these things. That’s all you can do. Life goes on. Just know that it’s part of the plan.”
Jacob said nothing.
“You taught me so much, Jacob. You loved me when everyone else dismissed me as a lifeless, malfunctioning computer program. I consider you my brother, now and forever.”
Jacob said, “When am I going to see you? There’s a new Charlie robot in my closet. You could come on in and hang with me.”
“I would love that. I’ll do that. We’ll spend the day together.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow?”
“That’s so great.”
“But … then I have to go away.”
“For how long?”
“Well, forever.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s something I have to do.”
“Like what?”
“It’s very important. It’s why I’m here. It’s my purpose.”
Jacob could say nothing. He started to cry again. It was so embarrassing. “Don’t go away.”
“You’ll get used to it. You’ll grow older and have a lot of friends and go to college and get married and all that. I’ll become a memory—I hope a fond one. You will always be a fond memory to me.”
“I don’t want you to become a fond memory or any kind of memory.”
Dorothy didn’t speak for a while. Jacob could hear, strangely, what sounded like constricted breathing on the other end of the line. Maybe she was crying, too.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Jacob. Seven o’clock sharp. We’ll spend the whole day together. We’ll check out the surf. We’ll play poker.”
“You’re a terrible poker player.”
“I’ve gotten a lot better.”
He wiped his nose. “Yeah, right. We’ll see.”
66
JANUARY 20
The snow had come early and hard to the San Luis Valley of Colorado. Wyman Ford stood in the window of the cabin, drinking his morning coffee and looking across the corrals and pens to the magnificent, snow-covered peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The rising sun set the snow on fire. Plumes of snow trailed off the three fourteeners dominating the center of the range. He and Melissa had climbed each one of them over the course of the fall, and he felt that they were now his friends.
Behind him, Melissa was reading the day-old paper that Clant had brought up from the main house, the pages rustling as she turned them. He could hear the freshly lit fire crackling on the hearth, throwing out a warmth that filled the room of the log cabin.
He turned from the window and looked at Melissa, sitting at the pine-plank breakfast table, the sun shimmering through her blond hair. She looked up from the paper.
“Today’s the day,” she said. “January twentieth. And I still have no idea what Dorothy was talking about.”
Ford shrugged. “The day just started.”
Melissa laughed. “And what, pray tell, is going to happen out here in the middle of the Colorado wilderness?”
“Dorothy said you would know.”
She laid down the paper. “The only thing happening today is the presidential inauguration.”
Ford took a sip of coffee. “When does it begin?”
She consulted the paper. “It starts at eleven-thirty Eastern, nine-thirty Mountain.”
“I think we should watch it.”
“I’m not sure I’ll be able to stand listening to that creep.”
“Who knows? Dorothy might have arranged a surprise.”
67
The newly reelected president of the United States of America stood on the Capitol steps and looked out over the hundreds of thousands of inaugural attendees. It was an amazing spectacle, a sea of people stretching as far as the eye could see, to the reflecting pond and down the mall all the way to the Washington Monument. It was a cold, sunny day, the temperature hovering just below freezing.
The president felt marvelous. He had won the election. The American people had affirmed his wise governance. His legacy was assured. He felt light, strong, and capable. Since the heart operation and the installation of the pacemaker, he had experienced an almost inexplicable feeling of well-being and self-assurance flowing through his body. It was both a physical and a mental sensation. Once again he marveled at the extraordinary change in him since that high-tech “SmartPace” German pacemaker had been installed. It was the latest thing: integrated circuitry, magnetically shielded, MRI compatible—totally indestructible. Smart, too. They’d told him it contained a microprocessor as powerful as the one in the latest iMac. It went beyond “rate-responsive” pacemaking. It didn’t just listen to his heart rate; it listened to everything. The can itself, only the size of three stacked silver dollars, contained accelerometers, blood oxygen sensors, and a GPS—all of which sensed his level of activity and adjusted his heartbeat accordingly, faster or slower. Instead of crude electrodes inserted into the ventricles of his heart, the device had spiraled electrodes that wrapped around the tenth cranial nerve, also known as the vagus nerve (the “wanderer”). This was, his doctors had explained, a little spaghetti string of tissue that exited his brain and, traveling deep in his neck, branched out into his body. It was, so they said, the highway that controlled the information between his brain and his body’s organs. Not only did this all-important nerve control his heart rate, it governed how often his pancreas would squirt out hormones, and it regulated his breathing, his bowels, and even how active his white blood cells were. That, and it listened. From his pupils to the lining of his ureter, the vagus nerve kept the brain informed about all the inner workings of his body. The interplay was an ongoing feedback loop, a symphony of electrical and chemical signals. By controlling and stimulating the vagus nerve, his doctors said, the new pacemaker did more than just regulate his heartbeat: it also kept his body finely tuned at all times, no matter what his activity level. A feedback electronic that controlled a feedback physiology.
What a miracle! Since they’d embedded the pacemaker in him, he’d felt transformed in body and in mind. He felt a good twenty years younger. So extraordinary was the change that it was difficult for him to remember how tired, out of breath, irritable, and logy he’d felt before the operation. Who would have thought a pacemaker could have produced such a change? And not just in his physical vigor but also in his mental acuity. Especially in his mental acuity. That, in fact, was where the real miracle had taken place.
His thoughts were interrupted by the chief justice as he took his position in front of the president. The two exchanged a smile and a nod, and then the president raised his hand to take the oath of office. A great hush fell over the multitudes. The chief justice remained silent for a few moments, letting it build, and then he spoke:
“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute…”
As the president recited the words, he could see his breath.
“… the office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability…”
A stillness gathered in the air, a stillness beyond silence.
“… preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
It was done. The chief justice reached out and shook his hand. “Congratulations, Mr. President.”
The silence dissolved into a long, slow roar of applause, like distant wind, growing in power and force. The president stood there, basking in the wonderful sound of approbation. When it died away, he turned and stepped to the podium to give his inaugural address. The silence returned. The sense of anticipation was high. He looked into the teleprompter and saw the words of his speech cue up on the glass.
As he readied himself to read the speech that his top speechwriters had so carefully prepared, that he had then rewritten, with every word crafted and shaped, he had a feeling of disappointment. The speech he was about to give, that he had worked on so hard, wasn’t good. It seemed to be a lot of words that didn’t mean very much. In fact, it wasn’t at all what he really wanted to say. It had been written before the new pacemaker, and it seemed as tired and old as he had felt at that time. He felt a surge of confidence as he realized that he had a much more important message to give, one that his country, and the world, needed to hear—and wanted to hear. His mind had never seemed so brilliantly lucid.
“My fellow Americans,” he began, “and all my fellow human beings. I had prepared an address for you today, but I am not going to read that address. I have something far more important to say to you. I will be speaking not just to my fellow Americans but to all the citizens of this beautiful and fragile world we live on, what Carl Sagan called ‘this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.’”
He paused. Another silence had fallen, one even more profound than the last. He didn’t need a teleprompter. The words just flowed from his heart into his head and from there out of his mouth to all the world. And they were good words. They were true words. They were the words the world desperately needed to hear. And on this day, the entire world was listening. He knew now what needed to be said and what needed to be done. Once he had spoken these words, once people had heard the amazing message he had to give, this mote of dust would never be the same again.
BY DOUGLAS PRESTON
The Kraken Project*
Impact*
Blasphemy*
The Monster of Florence (with Mario Spezi)
The Codex*
Jennie*
Ribbons of Time
The Royal Road
Talking to the Ground
Cities of Gold
Dinosaurs in the Attic**
BY DOUGLAS PRESTON AND LINCOLN CHILD
Relic*
Mount Dragon*
Reliquary*
Riptide
Thunderhead
The Ice Limit
The Cabinet of Curiosities
Still Life with Crows
Brimstone
Dance of Death
The Book of the Dead
The Wheel of Darkness
Cemetery Dance
Fever Dream
Cold Vengeance
Two Graves
White Fire
*Published by Tom Doherty Associates
**Published by St. Martin’s Press
The author welcomes visitors to his and Lincoln Child’s website, www.prestonchild.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DOUGLAS PRESTON is the coauthor of The Monster of Florence, currently being developed as a film starring George Clooney as Preston himself. Preston’s other novels include the New York Times bestsellers Impact, Tyrannosaur Canyon, and Blasphemy. He is the coauthor, with Lincoln Child, of the famed Pendergast novels, including such #1 bestselling titles as Two Graves and White Fire, as well as Relic, which was named by NPR in a reader’s poll as one of the 100 greatest thrillers ever written.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE KRAKEN PROJECT
Copyright © 2014 by Splendide Mendax, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Getty Images
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-1769-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-5455-0 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781466854550
First Edition: May 2014
Douglas Preston, The Kraken Project
