Klaxons drown out the screams. I smell smoke and the dust from shattered concrete. I’m standing just inside Johnson’s lab, surrounded by stainless steel fermenters and rows of refrigerators, in front of shelves of shattered glass vials and test tubes trembling in their racks. At the end of a counter I see the desktop monitor that Johnson must have used and I lunge toward it. There’s another rumble and the lights flicker.
It’s a computer that got me here. Four months ago, a machine intelligence on a Defense Intelligence Agency server registered my intrusion. It reached out through the web and followed my encrypted trail back through a series of rerouted networks, past a proxy server and onto my firewalled laptop.
I thought I had escaped detection. I spent a fair portion of the last afternoon of my normal life trying to convince my girlfriend that I had not just blamed her for my hack of the Department of Defense. “I was only saying that I wouldn’t have figured out the connection on my own,” I explained in my best reasonable-sounding voice.
“If I had thought that would make you start breaking federal laws I probably would have kept my ideas to myself.”
“I had to see what they were hiding.”
Jenna had been doing research on computer architecture for the past six months, and for reasons that apparently had not involved wanting me to break computer abuse statutes she had traced a handful of patents to a pair of shadowy government contractors and started to speculate about their use. What if the Defense Intelligence Agency’s hypothetical surveillance-directed artificial intelligence, publicly disavowed by Administration officials, wasn’t just hypothetical? What if it already existed? She was only interested in computers peripherally. Because she was dating a software engineer, she wanted to explore the potential of biocomputing. But once she’d asked her questions, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about them.
“These are people who can put you on trial without even letting your lawyers know what the charges are,” she said.
“I know what I’m doing. They’re not going to find me.” By the time I said that, though, her comments were already beginning to sow doubt. One of Jenna’s defining attributes is— was— that she was almost always right. Whatever the critical issue was, and no matter how deeply buried it was beneath compelling distractions, she usually homed in on it instantly. It’s what made her such a brilliant biochemist. Unfortunately, that was not always a skill in high demand among people whose sense of worth or career advancement depended on self-delusion, obfuscation or generally sloppy thinking, which seemed to be the main reason why her department chair and academic colleagues never let her rise above the position of adjunct professor.
“If you get a trial,” she said. “If they don’t just lock you up immediately.”
“Jenna, you were right about the AI. But that’s only the beginning. I saw digital copies of signed construction contracts for something called the Impregnable Stronghold. It’s a massive underground fortress to house government leaders. They’re preparing for nuclear war.”
Jenna looked up. Three black SUVs with tinted windows glided up the driveway and stopped in front of the split level. The armored doors of the closest vehicle opened and two men in black suits emerged from the 12-cylinder Ford hybrid. One scanned the street and yard while the other walked back to the middle vehicle and opened one of the rear doors. A large man with a graying buzz-cut and a fashionably tight-fitting charcoal suit climbed out and strode up to Jenna’s front door.
“I guess they found me after all,” I said.
The guy with the buzz-cut asked to see me. When I stepped past Jenna he introduced himself as Colonel Henrick Forsman. “Would you care to take a walk, Mr. Young?”
I wondered what would happen if I refused, but not quite enough to test it, particularly since it seemed like a good idea to find out what Colonel Forsman was there to say. I also had the irrational thought that getting some physical distance from Jenna would help to insulate her from my felony. We stepped out into the half acre field of ryegrass behind the house. The development was a few years old, and there were no fences between the houses’ back yards, just a long open space bordered on the far side by oak and maple trees.
“How did you find me here?” I asked.
Forsman ignored the question. His body language seemed remarkably relaxed for someone who might be about to take me away in handcuffs. But his pale blue eyes were studying me, appraising. “How did you break in?”
I wasn’t going to make things worse by lying. “The random number generator you use for encryption isn’t actually random.”
“Keep talking.” Forsman stopped walking, and I stopped beside him. We were midway between the woods and the house.
“One of your contractors posted a reference to the encryption key system on an internal message that was copied in a document that was very briefly posted online.”
Forsman nodded. “I’d like to offer you a deal. A chance to help your country. Hell, maybe the whole human race, if you care about that kind of thing.”
“I have a choice?”
“You can go to prison. If we have a country left when this is all over, you might even get out someday. But you already made your choice, didn’t you? You hacked into one of our servers.”
“I didn’t know—”
“You passed a test. We were looking for someone with your skills, and you let yourself be found.”
“The server was a honeypot? Is that how you normally find hackers?”
He looked at me. “No. But you’ve seen our files. You know how desperate our leaders are.”
If they had been waiting for someone to hack their server, they also could have planted false documents. But I had already found enough external data to mostly corroborate what I’d seen. I believed him. Maybe not everything, but I had no doubt the desperation he had mentioned was genuine. “What are you asking me to do?”
He started walking again, his back to the house. “You’ll have 24 hours to pack and say your goodbyes. You can’t tell anyone where you’re going, even your friend back there.”
I hadn’t decided what I was going to do yet. But obviously either way I was going to tell her.
The next morning I crossed the same field with Jenna, before the sun was fully up, when mist clung to the trees and colors had not yet emerged from the gloom. The grass was wet with dew and the bottoms of our pants were damp.
“If you go you’ll never come back,” Jenna said.
“I can help, or I can risk going to prison and possibly not get out anyway.” I turned to her. “I have to do this. War is coming. The plans for the Impregnable Stronghold mean that the Coalition’s chances are better than the government is letting on.”
“Where do they want you to go?”
“They’re flying me to Baumholder in Germany. I’m not supposed to tell you that. That’s why I took you out here. I don’t know if they have ways of listening at your house.”
“How long?”
“You said you didn’t expect me to come back.”
“But what did they say?”
“As long as it takes. Until the Coalition is no longer a threat. Hopefully not more than a year.” I looked at her, trying to meet her eyes, but she was looking at the tree line. “I love you. But your whole life is still ahead of you. I don’t expect you to wait.”
“Can I still talk to you? Will you have Skype?”
She had on the chunky aquamarine earrings we had gotten on the road trip to Rehoboth Beach and even though her eyes were thoughtful, because they were always thoughtful, because she was always looking just beyond anything I could see, I could hear a new, strained note in her voice. I absorbed all of it— the emerging uncertainty between us, the grass crunching as we shifted our feet, the cool morning air, the smell of buttonwood and azalea—and I knew that all of these perceptions, my whole subjective world, would sooner or later end, and no one would ever have these thoughts or memories again. No one would know how much I wanted not to leave her. “Everything has to be by email. My messages to you will be monitored. The colonel didn’t say it, but if they wanted to they could rewrite our messages and we wouldn’t even know. The AI you correctly guessed they have can mine the web to learn how we think and mimic our communication styles.”
“Then until you come back we won’t know if we’re really hearing from each other.”
“I’ve thought of a code we can use. Not even a code, a pattern. As long as you see it, you’ll know the message came from me.”
The car came to pick me up that evening. We were only ten minutes away from Jenna’s house when I knew something was wrong. “We missed the turnoff,” I said.
“We’re not going to the airport.”
“You said—”
Forsman grinned, and I saw that the casual air that had struck me earlier was due to the fact that he would say or do anything to get what he needed and not spend a moment thinking about it afterward. “We have a base here in Maryland.”
I realized then how difficult the next twelve months would be. It would have been one thing to think about Jenna continuing with her life without me, and to mislead my friends and my parents about where I really was, if I were across an ocean. It was something else entirely when I was less than an hour’s drive away.
The driver took us through hills forested with ash and maple and off the main road, up a single-lane strip of asphalt, past two razor wire-topped fences and into spreading fields of wheat and corn and hay. We passed a few outbuildings and approached a modest farmhouse that stood in the shadow of a solid-looking barn and a grain elevator. I didn’t see any apparent defenses. “Where’s the base?” I asked.
Forsman just grinned again. The barn doors slid open and we drove down a concrete ramp into a vast underground garage.
I’ve been underground ever since. There are—were—close to fifty of us. Engineers, programmers, scientists, soldiers, Defense bureaucrats, janitors, cooks. The facility they’ve built down here can hold at least three times that many, but that doesn’t make it feel any less claustrophobic. The main halls have full spectrum lighting that brightens and dims in tune with the daylight above, which I guess is supposed to make us forget that we can’t see the sun.
I share an office with half a dozen fellow coders. I’m quartered with three other men, two techies and a bioengineer from Minneapolis named Keith Johnson who has a lab down the hall from my office where he tries to coax prokaryotes into producing propane and proteins and other useful resources. But I have my own plans for his lab, and now that I’ve decrypted his lock and gotten past the security door I’ll find out whether I can get my idea to work before I’m shot in the back by one of the soldiers or the roof caves in on me.
“This is where we’re going to win the war,” Forsman told me the day he brought me here.
“The war that we’re not officially fighting.”
“The last president had to make the enemy think we were prepared, because we weren’t,” Forsman explained. “That was the only way to establish credible deterrence. But the new Administration reversed course because it was afraid that if the Coalition knew that we could withstand their nanospheres and pulse-nukes and biobombs they’d immediately start upgrading them. As it turns out, they were already were being upgraded, and we weren’t as prepared as we thought we were, so our attempt at obfuscation accidentally turned out to reflect the truth.”
“What’s my role?”
“You’ll be working on the next-gen artificial intelligence.”
“I take it that’s supposed to help guard against the Consortium.”
“The AI you’ll help complete will build a real-time strategic map of the entire battlespace, with the ability to use contextual information to fill in gaps in real-time.”
“You think war is coming.”
“There have already been attacks. All minor so far, meant to probe our defenses.”
“But you think we’ll win.” This was an optimistic but not unreasonable assumption. I couldn’t quite bring myself to frame it as a question.
For the first time I saw a serious look on his face. “Our mission here is to win. But there is a Plan B. The Midnight Legion.”
“What’s that?”
The grin came back. “If we do our jobs here, no one will ever find out.”
Despite his self-assurance, over the next few months my job constantly changed. First the AI was to supplement the war effort, then it was to find out what the enemy was working on and when and where it planned to attack, then it was to serve a backup command and control function in case military leadership was decapitated, then it was to preserve human knowledge if our civilization collapsed.
When I received that last order I knew we were in trouble, because if civilization truly did collapse an AI would be useless. There wouldn’t be anything left to power it.
One morning about sixteen weeks into my assignment I sat down in front of one of the computer terminals that had limited access to the Internet. Being unable to move freely online felt almost as constricting as the physical isolation of our underground facility. I had been told that our web restrictions were meant to prevent us from inadvertently exposing our base’s existence and location, but that didn’t make it any easier.
I started typing my daily message to Jenna. My themes had evolved since the first few disorienting days. Then, I had mostly discoursed about how much I missed her. Now I skipped that and went straight to nonclassified details about my work and new life. I didn’t want her to lose interest, or to feel guilt or ambivalence if she’d decided to start dating again, because either of those outcomes might mean that eventually she would no longer remain on the other end reading my emails. So on that occasion I wrote about my bunkmate Johnson.
I focused on the personal because I didn’t think other details would get past the censors. I had plenty of drama to mine. Johnson took every opportunity he could to let me know that he didn’t trust hackers like me. But I wrote to Jenna about him because apparently he did trust one of my programming colleagues, and from what he had told me about Johnson’s work I knew that Jenna would be interested in it professionally once I got out and had the chance to explain it to her.
Recently Johnson had begun looking at ways that his fuel-generating bacteria could eat some of the toxic chemicals our facility was producing. Given enough time and refinement this might solve several problems, including how to make the AI viable after the grid went down. My colleague had designed a visual programming language to let Johnson easily manipulate and recombine the bacteria’s DNA as easily as shifting around boxes on a screen.
I was almost finished when a new email arrived from Jenna’s address. It was about accompanying her grandmother to her oncologist the day before. Almost everything about the email was convincing. The writing sounded like Jenna’s voice, and the narrator’s facts were impeccable. I didn’t have Mrs. Reinherdt’s checkup schedule memorized, but this was about the right time for her next one, and it made sense for Jenna to mention it. The doctor’s name, the street, the type of cancer, the treatment and remission history—all of it was accurate. The only thing that was off was a reference to Mrs. Reinherdt’s offhand dismissal of one of Jenna’s recommendations. That might have been plausible for many grandmothers and their grandchildren, but not for Mrs. Reinhardt and Jenna. Mrs. Reinhardt didn’t dismiss Jenna’s ideas. No one did. When Jenna had an idea, you took it seriously. It’s not that the exchange couldn’t have happened, but it would have warranted some additional context.
Up until then I had been worried about censors doctoring messages I wanted to get out. It hadn’t occurred to me they would also be censoring messages coming in. What would be the point?
I skipped my shift to read through all of the emails I’d received from Jenna since I’d arrived. Now that I was looking I saw that she had been using the same simple pattern I’d applied to my own messages. Her first email to me started with a sentence containing 133 characters and consisted of 133 sentences. The next email was 420 and characters and the same number of sentences. The characters and sentences had matched until about a week ago, when the pattern stopped abruptly and did not return.
The day after this discovery I saw Forsman talking to a group of senior base officials. By that point he spent most of his time at other sites and I rarely ran into him, so I knew that if I wanted to speak with him this was my chance. I hovered in the hall until he started to turn away and then strode up to him. Two soldiers immediately turned and blocked my way. “Are our incoming messages censored?” I called past them.
Forsman stopped and stared at me. He no longer looked relaxed. He was impatient and tired and irritated at the interruption.
“My girlfriend, Jenna Crenshaw. There’s something she’s trying to tell me. But it’s not getting to me.”
Forsman looked torn, but then an aide tapped him on the shoulder and impatience won out. “She’s gone, Young. Frederick was hit a week ago. We’ve lost a dozen towns to suicide strikes since you came here. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this.”
I felt a rushing in my ears. “I don’t—how come—how—”
“Whoever you were doing this for before, you’re not doing it for them any longer. You’re doing it for yourself, and maybe the United States if it survives as a country. We’re saying publicly that we have the attacks under control, but the Coalition has demonstrated that it can get through our defenses, and there’s only so much longer we can deny that.”
The next day the walls and ceiling suddenly vibrated like the earth was trying to shake them off. A deep rumble came from above. I knew instantly and viscerally what was happening. The farm was being bombed. Even though it was midmorning I hadn’t yet gotten out of bed. Sometime during the night we had lost external communications, and I could no longer reach the AI that I was supposed to be helping to program.
There was a half-minute of shouts and sirens, and then the walls shook again. I imagined dying where I lay. The base no longer mattered. We were marooned underground with no knowledge of what remained above us.
It was my feeling of helplessness that spurred me to action. The people I loved were gone, and the artificial intelligence into which I had poured so much energy was unlikely ever to come online. I could no longer communicate with anyone I knew. Even if I left a message, it might not be found for years or decades.
I thought that meant my existence here would simply vanish. There was no sign I could leave that would survive this war. And then I realized I was wrong. We might not survive, but there was a way for our work here to remain. I jumped up and ran toward Johnson’s lab.
Now I reach the monitor and my proximity turns it on. For a panicked moment I expect to be waylaid by heavy encryption, maybe something biometric, but of course there’s nothing so sophisticated—with only fifty of us living in an enclosed space, if people are incapacitated others need to be able to access and carry on their work. The only thing blocking me is a password, which takes me about ten minutes to crack. Then I’m in.
The lights keep flickering, but the computer I’m using must be generating its own power. It’s a visual interface designed for someone who doesn’t know programming. I know programming, even though I know very little about biology. I hear booted footsteps in the hall outside. “Young! Are you in there? You’re not authorized to access this lab!”
The program is meant to let Johnson manipulate the bacteria’s genetic code, and that’s what I do. My first step is to enable the bacteria to produce modified proteins that can communicate with each other and, theoretically, help the prokaryotes coordinate their activities. The next step is more complicated, and I don’t know how well it will translate from computer programs based on brain architecture and emergent mind theories to living organisms: I adjust the way the bacteria respond to certain stimuli, primarily each other’s simple, repetitive actions. I fine-tune my previous work, so that at as the modified bacteria start to interact they will provide a one-time signal to let me know if my interventions are working. Then I set the bacteria on a course of accelerated replication.
There’s a huge roar from above, a boom that vibrates through my bones, and the ceiling collapses. Someone is screaming in a nearby room, but I hear nothing from the hallway, and gradually the scream subsides into whimpers and then there’s only silence, a deep, absolute silence. I feel pain so intense that all I can see are hallucinatory flashes in the darkness. Gradually I become aware of a new sound, coming from me. I am gasping.
At some point I realize I can see again, but I can’t move. I am trapped in rubble. Pain pulses in me, it pulls me open and lacerates me, it consumes me from within. I can’t feel or see my legs.
The screen in front of me is cracked, but it still shows me a shattered image. It’s the only source of light. After a while I hear screaming again, whimpering cries, muffled and far away. For the first time I am conscious of the weight of broken earth and stone above me, the depth of our tomb down here below.
I can imagine that this is the end of the base. I don’t know if it’s also the end of the United States of America. Perhaps it’s the end of the human species.
It’s my ending as well. I know I am going to die and when I die this throbbing pain will mercifully end. But through the pain a part of my mind is still racing, still observing. Even if my plan works perfectly, it might take half a decade before the new biological network is self-aware. Now all I can do is watch for the signal I programmed to tell me that it’s on the right track.
I wish I could see the sun again. I wish I could see Jenna. But I cannot move. All I can do is watch the broken screen in front of me, watch the bacteria swim and divide, swim and divide.
And then a pattern forms, a spontaneous alignment of single-celled bodies. The bacteria have formed a number: 133.
Here in the subterranean darkness a new consciousness is being born.
END.
By Aaron Emmel
Aaron’s fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He is also the author of a graphic novel, dozens of essays and articles, and the science fiction gamebook series Midnight Legion. Find him online at www.aaronemmel.com.