Vanadium Dark Read online

  He was saying it to the guards' departing backs. Message delivered, they were leaving.

  Angry, he stormed back to the cellblock.

  Lucas was still in his cell, lying in bed with his eyes shut. A swatch of corn-colored hair covered his eyes.

  He'd get his rec hour in thirty minutes. They scrambled the schedules around so that social groups among the prisoners were harder to form.

  “Wake up, shitbird!”

  His shout echoed through the hallways and corridors.

  Lucas came awake, groggily rising to a seated position. “Oh... hey... Anzor.”

  “Had a good sleep, Lucas? I've just been told that you ratted me out to the screws, and that I'm probably going to be shipped to a different prison.”

  Lucas lowered his eyes. He could talk, or he could hold eye contact, but he couldn't do both at the same time.

  “Sorry man, really sorry. The guard offered me three cigarettes. He just wanted to know if you'd been saying anything funny to me. And you had. What was I supposed to do?”

  “You idiot! “ Anzor had never lost his cool like this before, but Lucas had seemed like one of the good ones, a man who could perhaps be a friend.

  “I didn't want to make trouble, Anzor.” The kid fell into wheedling tones that you heard a thousand times a day in prison.

  “You don't want to make trouble? Be thankful I'm not in with any gangs. If you did this to a member of La Nuestra Familia, they'd find a seventy-year-old lifer who had nothing to lose and bribe him to carve a fuck-hole in your torso. Hell, that'll probably happen to you someday. And I'd pay to watch, you fucking piece of shit!”

  “Whoa, man... calm down.”

  “Do you know what you've just done? This is life and death for me. Everyone's my enemy in prison. If I hadn't gotten a single cell, I'd probably be dead by now. Now they're moving me back to general population, which is filled with patriotic goons who think I'm the biggest scumbag who ever lived.”

  “I didn't think they'd listen to me, I swear! Where was the harm?”

  “And they're trying to get me sent to a different goddamn prison. Leavenworth's only medium security. If I end up in one of the really rough places, I won't have a snowflake's chance in hell. I'll be a goner within a week.”

  “Hey, just listen for a second... ”

  “You sold my life for three lousy cigarettes, you goddamn, two-timing cockroach!”

  “Look, you don't have to fucking—”

  “You're a piece of shit, Lucas.” He felt like crying. “I'd rip your head off and take a piss into your neck if there weren't bars here.”

  “Hey! Break it up!” a guard shouted.

  Anzor he kicked the bars of Lucas's cell. He wore soft prison slippers, but the sound of the kick echoed up and down the cellblock.

  Lucas cringed away, trying to shrink into the furthest corner of his cell. Anzor saw fear in his eyes. He thinks I blew away a bunch of people at a Washington airport, and just as well. Fear me, asshole.

  He heard running feet, and someone shouting.

  He'd really blown it now.

  “Get down on the ground!” The guard thundered toward him with the momentum of a maglev. “Or I'll put you there!”

  Possessed by black rage that made the edges of his vision dim, he swung, and smashed his fist into the running guard’s solar plexus.

  There was an cut-off squawk of pain, and the charging man went down like a 250-pound sack of potatoes. His head banged against the steel bars on the way down.

  Dozens of voices shouted. An alarm blared.

  Prisoners rushed to their cell bars, grinning with excitement. Trouble on the cellblock.

  An array of blue-suited guards approached Anzor, batons and Tasers in hand. A bucklet load of adrenaline dumped into his system, Anzor was temporarily paralyzed. Far too late, he heard Lucas creep up behind him. The fragile blond kid reached through the bars and pushed him forward.

  He stumbled, and fell.

  Instantly, the guards were on top of him. A baton cracked his head. A booted foot slammed into his side.

  They picked up him and started dragging him in the direction of solitary confinement.

  Suddenly, a beetroot-red face appeared next to his eyes. The guard snorted, foul breath blowing across his face. It was one of the guys he'd spoken to a few minutes ago.

  “Thanks, scumbag. This makes things easy, doesn't it?”

  Dazed, his head pounding, Anzor heard the jangle of leg-irons being fetched.

  The Pentagon

  The next day, Viktor came to work at the appointed time and let himself into the Zoo.

  He said hello to Joyce. He wanted to ask her about Gideon, but he sensed they were not on speaking terms at the moment.

  He loaded the computer's config files. Blurring streams of data siphoned into the mainframe.

  He started on his cases, without a word to his secretary.

  Inertia is powerful, he decided. He had no real interest in continuing to do this job. He now questioned every single thing he saw and took no joy in establishing chains of evidence. For all he knew, he was pinning crimes on innocent people.

  But he couldn't change.

  Occasionally the goggles blurred and showed him something violent or disturbing. Sometimes, he could explore this new nightmare world for a few minutes. Other times, the viewscreen transmuted itself back to a depiction of the real world as soon as he touched the controls.

  No doubt inertia could carry him through this. Soon, he'd regard the sight of heads sawn open with band saws as just a tiresome intermission in his work.

  Maybe the Vanadocams kept various simulators for training purposes, worst-case scenarios or something. Maybe they were leaking through into his sessions, for some unknown reason.

  But the sequences were so bizarre, so surreal.

  And sometimes he appeared in them, either as a victim or a perpetrator.

  By midmorning, he heard the door slide open. Unusual. Joyce wasn't due for a coffee break for another thirty minutes.

  He heard snuffly breathing. Then, Gideon's voice.

  “Lovely, isn't it?”

  Viktor took the goggles off and turned his head.

  Gideon's black beard glistened blue at the tips from the reflected light.

  “What are you doing here?” Viktor asked.

  Gideon stared past him, to twin glows coming from the eyepieces of the goggles. He was like a moth, trying to reach the nucleus of that brilliant light.

  “I could use that device for hours. It's almost a shame that we have to use it for work, isn't it? This kind of device should be behind a glass case, at a museum.”

  Viktor looked to the left, saw Joyce sitting in her chair, gnawing a fingernail in anxiety.

  She wasn't going to intervene.

  “You're not supposed to be here, Gideon.”

  The bearded man didn't reply and didn't even seem to hear.

  “Gideon, are you listening? It's a constitutional requirement that only one person can use the Vanadocams at a time. You have to leave now. If you don't go, I'll call security.”

  The mention of security broke the spell. Gideon waved his hand, outmaneuvered, and took a few steps back. “Easy does it, Kertesz. I'm going.”

  Viktor glared at him and hoped Gideon would glare back. He hoped the bearded man would challenge him. Argue with him. Yell at him. Even fistfight him. That would be a conflict he understood: man against man, one on one.

  Anything except this eerie focus on the machine. It was as if Gideon barely knew that Viktor existed or that Joyce existed or that the Department of Defense existed.

  It was as if he lived in a world that consisted of just him and the computer.

  You remind me of my best friend, Pawel, after he got hooked on Japanese synthetic supermeth. It was like the drug was a third friend that joined us in all of our meetings, whether he had a stash or not. If you asked him to come over, he'd only agree if he could get high in your bathroom. If you asked him to go
out on the town, he'd first have to check how late his dealer was open. You're him, Gideon. You're a late-stage addict. And the government is paying to enable your addiction.

  Gideon walked away. Joyce tensed as his shadow passed over her desk.

  But at the doorway, he stopped and turned around.

  “It's getting stronger all the time, you know. Tearing itself apart, and knitting itself back together. Flexing its muscles then building better ones. The Vanadocams talk to each other. Soon they'll talk to you and me. It will be the camera that controls reality.”

  Viktor stared daggers at him.

  “There's a man with a large forehead. No nose. Have you seen him?” Gideon said. “He came to me in a dream last night.”

  “You. Will. Go.” Viktor whispered, reaching for the phone that connected him to Pentagon security.

  “Within five years, he will be God. A nano-scale superintelligence that makes humanity completely irrelevant. Within ten years, no living thing will exist anywhere on earth. It will have erased us completely. We arose out of atoms. Back to atoms we will go.”

  Viktor picked up the phone and spoke to the PFPF dispatcher. “Hello? This is Viktor Kertesz, intelligence analyst. There's a man in the basement I need removed.”

  Gideon opened the door for himself, still talking. “I have only one ambition: to merge with it. That's the only goal worth having on this earth at the moment. If you're smart, you'll do the same.”

  “Yes, he's threatening my secretary and me and disrupting Project Elephant's case flow. Can you send someone? Yes... .yes, thanks... wait, don't bother. He's gone.”

  The doorway was Gideon-free. Joyce went to shut it, shooting a harried look at Viktor.

  “Was he like that yesterday?” Viktor asked her.

  “He... uh... he hardly spoke. He's an intense man.”

  “He's a bag of mixed nuts. And Wilson wants him here? Incredible.”

  “Don't worry about it, sir. Just return to work.”

  “Do you think I should tell Wilson about this? Let him know that this little psych ward escapee is fucking with us? I've got the Vanadocam footage to prove it.”

  “You're only meant to access the Vanadocam mainframe to solve a duly-categorized case.”

  “Balls to that.” He punched in the coordinates of the Pentagon and drilled straight down to the basement, flying through floors and ceilings and pipes.

  He found himself in the dark room, illuminated by the demon glow of electronics. He rewound the clock to about a minute ago.

  They were alone in the room.

  Two minutes ago.

  There was still no one else there.

  Three minutes ago.

  No Gideon.

  He did not get a chance to rewind further because the viewscreen shook and changed.

  Row after row of limbless people hung from hooks, suspended above a gore-splattered floor as they swung and squirmed.

  With a cry of shock, Viktor pulled the goggles off his head again.

  Joyce still stared at him.

  She thinks I'm just as crazy as Gideon.

  Colophon 3

  The most intriguing possibility behind the Vanadocams is the one that's seldom discussed: the possibility of controlled evolution.

  Self-replicating nanobots were a staple of science fiction throughout the Twentieth Century, but we've never, ever seen them in reality. For one thing, they seem impossible to build. For another, they would be highly dangerous.

  A self-replicating robot could have disastrous implications for humanity if it escaped containment, and it would escape containment. Between machine persistence and human security protocols, you can always bet on the machines.

  Making the bots benign, or coding them with certain limiting instructions—to not reproduce if it's a third generation bot, for example—does not fix the problem. Robot bodies are not built perfectly any more than human bodies. Any time a nanobot reproduces itself, the risk exists that it will be different: a mutation, in evolutionary terms. Eventually, a mutation will appear that ignores whatever safety instructions were coded into the bot.

  In theory, the manufacturing process of the Vanadocams allows the bots to evolve, but with a human hand on the process at every time.

  The Vanadocams are produced in endless graphite-spewing assemblies with a directed and guided human design. It's easy to adjust the actuators in the graphite stream so that slightly different bots are made. These adjustments can be made manually or automatically.

  If automatically, they are made in response to the aggregate of signals beamed to the Vanadocam pylons. Each transmission from a Vanadocam contains a signature describing its current design. If certain mutations thrive in the population, Project Elephant will know about it from the large number of transmissions from those bots. Then it is a simple matter to incorporate these changes into the “master blueprint” so that the mutation becomes the standard design.

  If certain mutations appear that you do not want, you can manually reset generators and make them produce an earlier “blueprint.”

  Sun-Hi Shin was at least fifty years ahead of her time. It wasn't enough to have machines build themselves or even to troubleshoot themselves. She found a way for them to upgrade themselves.

  All of this is only theoretical, of course. To what extent they were actually implemented by Project Elephant remains unknown.

  “Unknown” is a watchword of Sun-Hi Shin's final years working for the Department of Defense.

  Even the declassified parts raise more questions than they answer. What was she doing? How far did her work progress? How much of it was put into operation? And what was her mental state?

  As the clock ticked down to the Vanadocam Network being put into active service, a conflicted picture of Shin emerges.

  In photos and video from her rare public appearances, Shin is a smiling woman with a commanding presence, despite her 4'11 height, with streaks of grey in her hair. She spoke often about the need to protect the American public from harm and what an honor it was to be chosen to render this service.

  But in private documents and in emails to friends she spoke of her doubts about Project Elephant.

  No names are named, but the content of these communications is tantalizing. She spoke of “deception” and “false promises” and how she thought she might be laying the groundwork for something she did not believe in.

  In one of them, sent to her father, she confessed that she would probably let her contract lapse in the new few months and return to Korea.

  All of her future plans are now academic, of course. In 2035, a radical on her security detail opened fire on her entourage at a Washington military airport, killing four people and putting Shin into a coma.

  Project Elephant issued a statement later that week, expressing sorrow over the tragedy and promising to honor Shin by continuing her life's work.

  - Excerpt from Vanadocams Demystified, 3rd Ed, University of Nebraska Press, 2039

  Exegete 1: French Wiretaps

  DIRECTION GÉNÉRALE DE LA SÉCURITÉ EXTÉRIEURE -

  INTERCEPT FILE # 5235735 -

  C / O AGENT SPECIAL MATHIS DUFRESNE

  [voix masculine]

  W: Good to see you, Engeld.

  [voix masculine]

  E: The pleasure's all mine, Wilson. You've met Project Elephant's new CTO, Louise Millicent?

  W: I'm sure I have, but I can't remember when.

  [voix féminine]

  L: Dinner at the Diplomatic Corps reception two years ago?

  W: That'd be the place. Well, it's a first meeting if I can't remember you. How's your new job suiting you?

  L: I'll let you be the judge. A lot's happening, and we've got some things we need to bring you up to speed on.

  W: Such as?

  E: Wilson, how much do you know about Directive Ivory Tusk?

  W: That it exists.

  [le rire de femme]

  L: Not exactly what I'd call an in-depth analysis, Wilson.
/>   W: Uh... before we proceed. How... filtered is this conversation?

  L: What do you mean?

  W: The President has made it clear to me that all talk about Directive Ivory Tusk is to be contained. He's worried about state secrets leaving this building. After that French wiretapping business, you understand.

  E: Quite reasonable. But let's talk freely. Things are moving quickly, and it's vital that we all stay on the same page.

  W: Okay. I know that Directive Ivory tusk is a clandestine extension of Project Elephant, run on a black budget. I know that it involves exploiting emergent properties of the Vanadocams. I also know that substantial breakthroughs have been made in the past few weeks. I've spoken with some engineers and programmers on the project. By the way, Enfield, I must complement you on how ignorant everyone is.

  E: Thank you. We rely on secrecy, and that includes our own staff. Tasks are broken up piecemeal so that none of the worker bees can see the whole. Only the upper level knows.

  W: It's goddamn incredible. I've spoken to one guy from MIT who thinks he's working on flywheel camshafts for hydro-farms in the Midwest. He really has no clue what he's doing.

  E: We realized something after Sun-Hi Shin threatened to expose us: knowledge is dangerous. Dangerous for Project Elephant. Dangerous for us. Dangerous for everyone.

  L: So we split up the tasks fifty ways and farm them out to the lowest bidders. But back to Directive Ivory Tusk. Do you know what it actually does?

  [silence prolongé]

  W: I only know parts of it.

  L: Then you have the ideal qualities to work for Project Elephant, Secretary. Though I fear we can't match your current salary.

  [Le rire de tout]

  E: Let's cut to the chase. Directive Ivory Tusk's goal is to create an artificial intelligence using the Vanadocam cloud as a computing medium.

  W: Whoosh. You lost me already.

  E: It is fundamentally simple. People think of Vanadocams as little cameras. It requires only a slight shift of one's thinking to see them as they truly are, as computers.

  L: Or rather, parts of a computer.