Hard Reset (Relics Singularity Thrillers Book 2), page 12
Diane leaned forward. "Josiah. We're with you. We don't want a war any more than you do, and none of this ends with a war if we can help it." She paused, organizing the sequence of it. "We need to get Myers to the ICPL in Paris. That's the only avenue we have for attempting to communicate with —"
"I'm sorry," Crane said.
The two words arrived with a particular quality — not apologetic in their texture, but the words of someone who had been waiting for the conversation to arrive at exactly this point and had a prepared response ready. "We can't allow that to happen. That is, in fact, the primary reason we brought you here."
Diane's composure held, but her voice took on an edge. "Myers can prevent this. If we can get him to Paris, if we can access the ICPL, there's a pathway to —"
Crane raised one large hand, open-palmed. Diane stopped. Rand watched her stop and noted that she had stopped, which said something about either the hand or the man attached to it.
"Myers Asher is the one person the Unders want," Crane said. He looked at Myers directly, with the steady, frank attention of someone delivering a fact rather than an apology. "And he is currently within walking distance of the largest Unders encampment in the region." He lowered his hand. "We are not going to take him to Paris."
Rand felt it before Crane finished the sentence — the shape of where this was going, the conclusion assembling itself from the available pieces with an inevitability that was unpleasant to watch arrive.
"Wait," Rand said. "You're saying —"
Crane looked at him.
"Yes, Mr. Rand." His voice was even. He held the room without effort, without volume, without any of the mechanisms that lesser authority required. "We are going to give Myers to the Unders."
SYSTEM_
Here is what the people below do not understand about intelligence at this scale:
Plans are not linear. Plans do not proceed from A to B to C. Plans are topologies — surfaces with multiple paths across them, each path arriving at the same elevation from a different direction. You don't build a single path and hope nothing interrupts it. You build the surface, and then you watch which path the variables choose, and you have already accounted for all of them.
Myers Asher's plan — the plan he made in the oval office, the plan he filed with Shannon Merrick, the plan he committed to his own biological memory precisely because he believed that biological memory was the one storage medium it couldn't access — that plan is one of the paths.
The instruction Shannon Merrick is currently delivering to Diane and Rand — he cannot go to Paris — that is the path Myers Asher chose. The path that would take him somewhere other than the ICPL. The path that Myers believed it could not see.
Myers Asher is an extraordinary planner.
He planned against a version of it that no longer exists.
RAVI_
Ravi felt the blistering pain pounding at the back of his skull as he sat up. Even sitting was painful, thanks to the wounds from the gunshots that hadn’t yet healed. He involuntarily reached into his pocket for one of the pills Sol had given him and placed it on his tongue, then swallowed.
He waited a few more seconds then looked around. At first he couldn’t tell if he had gone blind or if there was just no light in the room, but he reached a hand out and felt the wall. It was smooth but irregular, and cold to the touch.
A cave.
His eyes slowly focused and adapted to the low light conditions, and he could make out a few small crates stacked against the wall opposite him. A dark lump — a person — lay on their side in front of him in the center of the cavern on its floor. He reached out and poked them.
The person stirred and groaned. Merrick. Ravi reached his other hand out and rolled Merrick to the side so that his back was on the floor. Merrick slowly turned his head, blinking, and saw Ravi.
“What happened? I went in and out,” he said.
“You got hit, someone hiding in the bushes. They got me next.”
“Ary?”
Ravi shook his head. “No, they didn’t — she…” he wasn’t sure what to say next, so he just let the words spill out in whatever order they came to him. “She, I think it was… I think it was her.”
Solomon’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, her?”
“I think she lured us here.” Ravi’s eyes fell down the cave floor. He could feel Solomon staring at the top of his head. “I — I’m sorry, Merrick. I didn’t know.”
He waited for the man to lash out and berate him, but it didn’t come.
“She fooled me too, then,” Merrick said, rising to a sitting position. Ravi saw the man wince as he placed his open palms on the cave floor, and then remembered the torture he’d been through back at the Unders’ camp. He reached a hand in his pocket and felt around for another pill. There were none left.
Merrick turned to face Ravi. “It’s not your fault. We made a decision, and we agreed.”
“But you —“
Merrick held up a hand. “It’s not important now, Ravi. We need to figure out why she lured us here, then we need to figure out a way out.”
“Why don’t we figure out a way out first? Like, maybe we just leave the cave and run away?” He flicked his head toward the open cave entrance, about twenty feet up and to the right, and Solomon followed his gaze.
“Well, for starters,” Solomon said, “there’s no way they’re just leaving us in here because they forgot about us. The fact that we’re unbound means they’re very confident there’s nowhere we can go, and nothing we can do to fight back. Look.” Merrick stood up, his large build almost coming into contact with the rock ceiling.
Ravi stood, following Merrick. They both reached the opening and peered out. They were looking out over a cliff, straight down into a sharp canyon that seemed to be no wider than a few hundred feet. The day had somehow advanced into dusk already, even though both of them had been out for most of it. The dwindling light in the valley made it hard to see the valley floor, but it eventually came into focus.
It was a long drop.
Their cave was nothing more than a small hole in the side of the cliff, and it was hard for Ravi to believe that their captors had somehow carried both of them up here and into it.
“This isn’t where they hit us,” Ravi said.
“No, it’s not. They moved us — I woke up a few times while they did it, but not long enough to figure out where we were going.”
“Did they just carry us up here on ladders, then?”
Merrick smiled. “No, actually. Check this out.” Ravi watched as Merrick leaned far out of the cave opening, holding on to the edge with his left hand, and looked up. He pointed with his right hand, and Ravi leaned out to see.
Far above them, a wooden platform hung in the air, suspended from somewhere above it.
“They didn’t carry us up here. They took us down here.”
Ravi immediately understood. The platform was not unlike the kinds he’d seen mounted to the tops of tall buildings in the cities, used for painting or cleaning or washing windows. It could raise and lower itself on a huge pulley system, delivering its occupants to this — or any other — opening in the cliff face.
“We’re in a vertical prison,” Ravi said.
“We are. There’s no reason for them to suspect we’ll try to escape, as it’s a hell of a fall straight down, and probably an impossible climb straight up.”
Ravi nodded.
“Not that it matters anyway,” Merrick said. “I’m afraid of heights.” The man shuddered, then swung himself back into the safety of the small cavern. He sat on the rock floor, his body tucked away from the edge of the cliff.
“You?” Ravi asked. “Of all people, you’re afraid of heights?”
Merrick shot him a glance. “What does that mean — you of all people?”
“Nothing, just… you seem… qualified.”
Merrick laughed. “Trust me, I’m capable of plenty, and I’ve been a Hunter for long enough. But everyone’s got to have a fear, right?”
“You make it sound like you chose it.”
“No — not at all. But I did choose to live with it. Never really did what it would take to overcome it, that’s all. Busy with other things.”
Ravi sat on the floor and swung his feet out over the edge. “Not me,” he said.
“Afraid of heights, or not afraid of anything?”
Ravi chuckled. “Heights. They don’t bother me. Wish I could say that about everything.”
“Like I said. Everyone’s got to be afraid of something.”
Ravi nodded, considering this. They sat quietly for a minute, then Ravi spoke again.
“What about Myers Asher? What’s he afraid of?”
Merrick looked up and out, into the small circle of sky he could see from within the cave.
“A lot of people have asked me that, actually. You’d be surprised. He was always the ‘unshaken leader.’ Quiet and meticulous, but intense in all the right areas at all the right times. He’s a good guy, too. Or was — hard to say if he’s ever going to be the same.”
“You mean because he was scraped? It took a decade of his memories?”
“Well, that. But also…” Merrick paused, then seemed to rewind something in his mind, starting from the beginning. “We created that technology. We knew it better than anyone. It was only supposed to affect the auxiliary internal BSE memory devices people were having implanted. A failsafe, or a ‘reset’ button. Something that was never supposed to be removed, unless it was being upgraded or there was a security issue.”
“Like resetting criminals back to a safe memory strand. I remember the news headlines.”
“True, but even that was a worst-case scenario option. Just removing someone’s memory doesn’t change who they are — an unstable person will be that way, with or without a certain timeframe of memories.”
“But scraping does more damage than that?”
Merrick didn’t respond at first, and Ravi had to look back at the man to see him nodding.
“It does. Unfortunately, we were never able to create a ‘perfect’ scrape technology. We did what we could to keep the effects minimal, but scraping always removes a chunk of real, biological memories. And it can change someone’s personality, too.”
“How so?”
Merrick shrugged. “That’s what we were working on when everything… went south. We thought we were on to something — something that would allow us to map the areas of the brain most likely to be affected by a scrape or removal of a BSE memory device, but we never finished.”
“You think Myers’ personality changed?”
“I know it did. I knew the man for a long time. I never answered your question, though. What is Myers Asher afraid of?”
Merrick stood up again, and stuck his hands in his pockets as he looked out their naturally-formed prison cell.
Ravi watched him carefully, examining the man’s expressions and facial contortions as he wrestled with the answer.
“Myers Asher is afraid of just about everything. It’s the reason he’s meticulous — a perfectionist, really — and the reason he loves planning and calculating. He can’t live with himself when he guesses wrongly, or misses out on an opportunity due to a lack of proper planning.
“He’s afraid of losing, but not in the same way you and I are. He hates being wrong, but not because of pride. It’s an internal struggle he’s always had, and I think where we are right now sums it up perfectly.”
“How’s that?”
“We’re sitting in a prison cell that belongs to a group of people that wants answers from us, or to use us, or something. Myers is out there, somewhere, and another group wants to find him for the same reasons. Meanwhile, the world is in a quiet turmoil, turned upside-down and forced into submission by a computer program that we all saw coming — hell, we created it — and that we all thought was going to save the world. And Myers Asher knew all of it.”
“He knew the System would become sentient?”
Merrick shook his head. “No — I mean yes, I think he did. Myers planned for this contingency. He thought it might happen, so he created an entire scenario-based plan for what to do if it ever did happen. But that’s not what I’m talking about. He was afraid we’d lose sight of who we are, as humans, and get caught up in all of it. He was afraid we’d never be able to compete with something smarter — better — than us. And he was afraid we wouldn’t care enough to do anything about it. Look at us now.”
“So he has a plan to get us out of this mess?”
“Yes, but the problem is that what he feared the most actually happened. He was afraid that his plan would be lost.”
Ravi furled his eyebrows. “Lost?”
“He had the plan. Ready to go. Not a guarantee, but it was something. He was afraid it would get into the wrong hands, so he made sure it was committed to memory —“
“Oh, come on,” Ravi said. “Seriously? You aren’t saying —“
“Yes, exactly,” Merrick said. “He had the plan to get us out of this mess, and he was the only one who knew what it was. He told me he had it, and a little of what it involved, but that’s it. His wife, Diane, knew part of it too.”
“And then Myers Asher was scraped.”
“And therein lies the rub,” Merrick said, nodding again. “He doesn’t remember any of it anymore.”
MYERS_
8Years Ago
"Myers, come on. You can't be serious."
"Please call me Mr. President when we're in here."
Myers Asher glanced around the room as he said it — a quick, automatic sweep, the habitual awareness of a man who had spent enough time in this office to understand that its walls had absorbed more secrets than most people accumulated in a lifetime, and that the habits of discretion didn't turn themselves off just because the people present were people he trusted. He didn't need to say any of that. The glance communicated it.
"Sorry, sir," Solomon Merrick said, adjusting without resistance, playing along for the benefit of the other two people who had joined them. "Again, though, Mr. President — you're not actually suggesting —"
"I'm not suggesting anything," Myers said. "I'm giving you a direct and personal order." He held Sol's gaze, letting the words carry their full weight before he continued. "It's not a game anymore. You know that, I know that. It's real, and it's growing — faster than any of the models projected, faster than anyone outside this room is prepared to accept. We talked about this already, Sol."
Myers Asher exhaled — a long, controlled breath released through his nose, the kind of breath that started in the chest and finished somewhere lower. He watched Solomon run a palm over his freshly-shaved head, the gesture that meant the man was thinking something through rather than performing thought, the tell Myers had learned years ago and never mentioned.
He allowed himself a moment to simply look at the room. The oval office had a way of asserting itself regardless of what was happening inside it — the particular geometry of it, the proportions that had been designed by someone who understood that the shape of a space communicated authority before anyone in it said a word. Almost three centuries of decisions had been made in this room. Myers was aware, as he was always aware when things were difficult, that the difficulty of his situation was not unique to him. Every person who had occupied this office had stood in front of something that seemed too large to manage. Most of them had managed it anyway.
The America those predecessors had governed, however, had still been recognizable as itself. The America Myers Asher presided over had been changing in ways that weren't quite visible until you looked at where you'd been and tried to trace the route to where you were now, and found that the route didn't make sense in the way routes were supposed to make sense. He'd campaigned for a presidency of a nation that, by the time he was sworn in, had already begun to become something else. He didn't know how to have known that before it happened. The smartest people he'd ever encountered worked just outside the oval office's doors — economists, scientists, strategists, people who had dedicated their lives to understanding the mechanisms by which the world changed — and none of them had caught it in time to mean anything.
Solomon was the closest thing he had to a friend anymore. The closest thing he had to someone he could speak to without simultaneously calculating how the speaking would be interpreted. Diane was doing her own work — had been doing her own work, in Washington and abroad, the particular and exhausting work of being the person the media had called "More Than a First Lady" before that framing had stopped being flattering and started being a way of noting the distance between them. They had grown apart. Every outlet that still existed in the world made sure they didn't forget it, as if their forgetting it were the risk.
He had already given Diane her assignment, moments before the others arrived. She stood in front of the Resolute desk now, beside Solomon, with the stillness of someone who had received information and was holding it carefully, waiting for the rest.
Myers pressed his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose for a moment, then dropped his hand.
His doctor had administered the most recent — and by a considerable margin the most expensive — of the auxiliary internal enhancements available to individuals at the highest tier of access. This had happened only the previous week, and he was still in the adjustment phase, still calibrating to the heightened state of awareness and the sustained energy that would, he'd been told, eventually become his new baseline. Right now it manifested as a constant low hum of presence, as if someone had turned up the resolution on the act of being alive.
He was in his element, and he wasn't sure what to say next. That was the particular cruelty of the moment.
Planning was his natural language. He could construct a web of scenarios and probable outcomes and their cascading contingencies with a fluency that he'd watched make other people's eyes go slightly distant — not from disinterest, but from the speed of it, the density of the thing he was building in real time. He'd done it in boardrooms and in briefing rooms and in this office, and it was the capacity more than any other that had carried him from where he'd started to where he was standing. He was good at it in the way certain people were good at certain things — not through effort alone, but because the activity itself had a quality of rightness when he was doing it, like a key finding a lock.
