The gray-faced ape lifted his glasses in show. “Old age,” he explained, slipping them over his eyes.

“You could have corrective surgery,” Nio suggested from the bottom of a very plush visitor’s chair.

“The risk of accidental blindness these days is very low, but that’s only because the surgeons know what they’re doing. None of them, I’m afraid, have any experience correcting the vision of a chimpanzee. Rather than subject several dozen of my cousins to practice and experimentation, I have opted for corrective lenses.”

He adjusted them on his face.

“Even though they make me look ridiculous.”

Nio smiled faintly.

Dr. Chang sensed the seriousness of her concern and dropped the pretense at humor. “It seems I owe you an answer to your question.”

“That was the deal.”

Chang looked out the window at the capitol, whose illuminated dome was just visible in the dark, peeking over the angles of an intervening building.

“A century ago,” he said, “when I was launched into space, weather forecasting was considered a joke. But by the first decade of this century, a 10-day forecast was as accurate as a 3-day forecast was in 1980. Now, we can tell with reasonable certainty what the weather will be in your zip code at 3:00 in the afternoon on Thursday next. Hurricanes used to appear from nowhere, destroying fleets and causing untold destruction. Now, we know a week in advance where one will hit, allowing us to make evacuations and secure property. That knowledge—knowledge of the future—is seemingly mundane, but consider the impact it has on the world. It allows you to alter the future, to change travel plans or reschedule a wedding or sporting event that is likely to be rained out. Because of our predictions, and our belief in them, real outcomes change.

“The same story can be told about votes, not just in the nation but in Congress specifically. On the eve of an election, we can tell with reasonable certainty how any zip code in the country will vote. Similarly, there are very sensitive models, some of them quite secret, that track Congress—and other world governments—similar to the predicted hurricane tracks meteorologists show on TV.

“After the Science and Technology Control Act passed the House of Representatives earlier this year, very handily I might add, it became clear to me, and to certain others who watch these things, that something very strange was happening. The models measure how ‘volatile’ every single political voter is, how susceptible to influence. A key determining variable is gender. Men are more ‘influencable’ than women, probably because female representatives still feel the need to over-demonstrate resolve. Presence or absence of children also matters. Childless representatives are more willing to take risks, their counterparts to uphold the status quo.

“But the biggest determinant of volatility is a simple integer. It is the difference between the present balance of a politician’s reelection fund and the projected amount needed to win. The greater that gap, the more volatile the vote.

“I must say, volatility isn’t inherently bad. As it approaches zero, you have the opposite problem: a representative that is either fully bought or else so intransigent as to never change his or her mind, no matter the evidence presented.

“Different models give different weights to these variables such that very close votes are often difficult to call. But the models, like those hurricane tracks, typically cluster around a common set of outcomes. None of them projected the Act would pass by such a margin. It was a notable outlier.”

“A fluke?”

“A manipulation. As soon as we plugged the results from the House into our models of the Senate, the results changed dramatically. Where before we had projected a close win, now the models suggested the bill would fail by a wide margin. That in fact was the goal—a non-obvious strategy, like a chess feint, probably developed by one of the Shri machines. Instead of resisting the vote in the House, our unseen adversaries helped get the bill over the hump. In so doing, they created the perception that the whole process was rushed, that we were making a big change to the law, to society, without really thinking things through. Stories began to run in the media to that effect, some of which were almost certainly planted by these interests. Senators received more emails and phone calls from concerned citizens than they would have if the House vote had been as close as originally projected. Schedules were delayed. Hearings were extended. Even I was recalled.

“This town is called a swamp. The metaphor is more apt than most people know. It has a certain viscosity. If you can maintain a velocity, you can sort of skate over it. Once everything slows and you slip into the slime, it’s almost impossible to get free.

“Human beings have weaponized narratives before. Religions in particular have been very good at it. But they stumbled in. Nothing before was ever so precise, so measured in its exploitation of the limits of human cognition. Of course, never before have we had the means. It used to be there were only so many players, only so many pieces, only so many possible moves. In a low-information environment, generals and politicians worried about keeping secrets—and they still do to some degree. But in a world where everyone has a camera in their pocket, keeping secrets is mostly wasted effort. Rather than restrict information, they try instead to overwhelm the human sense-making capacity, to release reams of it—some real, some half real, some entirely fabricated—such that there is no way for a single human, observing at a distance, to make sense. Each of us has no choice but to fall back on what we know. That is the goal—not so much to control us as simply to make us predictable.

“This is how modern governments function. Far from being the determinant of outcomes, the votes of the populace and the second-order votes of their representatives are instead the chess pieces by which actual outcomes are decided, often between indiscernible players—who may be other governments.”

“But why this bill? What are they worried about?”

Dr. Chang raised his heavy eyebrows. It was like a curtain parting in a dark theater to reveal a lighted stage. “Our adversaries don’t object to the STCA on its merits, despite what their bots and mouthpieces say. In fact, they rather like its broad powers. What they object to is that those powers would be wielded by a public entity, and that it will start monitoring new technological threats. That means someone will be looking under the bed covers, whereas now, no one is. It is always easier for dark forces to operate in the dark.

“Senator Brown was one of the volatile votes, which meant, after the result in the House, he suddenly found himself courted by all sides. It was clear from my many conversations with him that, having no strong opinion, what mattered most was how his vote would impact his reelection campaign, which was already generously funded thanks to his unexpected leverage. The models suggested such a man would take the path of least resistance. He would vote against the bill, if only to say he was against the creation of ‘large new bureaucracies,’ which plays well as a sound bite to the people of Wyoming.

“The model suggested we needed to reduce his volatility score—we needed to give him, and his colleagues, a reason to have an opinion, a reason to care.”

Nio was staring at the floor, which had flourishes similar to those at the corner of dollar bills. “This is why you left your post at the NSF, isn’t it? You’re leading the charge on the bill for the president.”

“Indeed. She wants the STCA to be part of her legacy, so we set up a war room in secret, very much like Mr. Lincoln did with the 13th Amendment. This is the level of effort it takes to pass any real legislation in a diverse nation of nearly half a billion people. We had to convince Senator Brown, and the others like him, that everything was not fine the way it was, that people were being hurt, that contrary to popular claims, advanced technologies were not locked tight inside university laboratories. They had escaped. Your investigation demonstrated that. Vividly.”

“So why not just tell me?”

“If I had, what would you have said?”

Nio turned to the capital building in the distance. “I woulda told you to stuff it.”

“Yes.” Dr. Chang chuckled softly. “Precisely.”

“So, you rolled the dice.”

“Not really. My dear, having an ape in a classroom is a distraction, so you don’t know how many times I observed you all as children. You were always the troublemaker, even when you were a little girl. You had that impish smile you’d hide by pulling your shirt up over your nose. Che is a revolutionary. He was always going to be dangerous. But you were the trickster. You took such delight in turning that classroom on its head, not to take power but to return it. It is your calling.”

Nio stared at the front of the ape’s impressive desk. “Is the Lapse real?”

Dr. Chang didn’t immediately answer.

“Or is it just another calculated psychosocial manipulation? Designed to tell me whatever I needed to hear.”

He took a deep breath.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I thought you might. If I were a betting ape, I would guess the latter. But the effect is consistent with the known laws of physics. Unfortunately, after Sol, I’m not sure there’s anyone even contemplating such things, let alone at his level. They’re all too busy building bigger and bigger machines. Research programs, like any bureaucracy, become self-justifying once a certain threshold of cash is surpassed.”

Nio nodded, lost for a moment in the implication.

“What happens if I go public? Or are you counting on our shared history to keep me quiet?”

“Not at all,” he said flatly. “I don’t expect to have any special influence over you. The bill has passed. The president will sign it on the White House lawn tomorrow. After that, you should do what you feel is right.”

“But?”

The genius chimp crossed his long fingers in front of his mouth. “Mankind alone among the animals realizes the fact of his death. The shock of that, the effect it has on your species, is impossible to overstate. Knowing their mortality, humans naturally seek to secure their legacy by other means. It’s why the president was willing to go to such lengths. I’m old, Ms. Tesla. I can assure you that after a certain age, we think of little else. We feel the curtain closing slowly—if we’re lucky, that is. If it doesn’t slam shut suddenly and unexpectedly. If you feel it would be helpful to tell the world that not only will they die, but there is a non-zero chance that, without warning or reason, reality itself can change, perhaps erasing them or their work entirely, and if you think they would believe you, then of course you must do that.

“But consider, if the effect is real, it’s always been with us. It’s part of the universe. It’s part of the risk we assumed by being born into it. I am a scientist,” he said grimly. “More than that, I am an explorer. I have declared for a side—I am against obfuscation. But it seems to me in this case that the mechanism proposed can neither be confirmed nor denied, at least not with the current state of the art. As a figure of authority, who do I serve by asserting it? Whose life is made better? If it’s true, then it will out—organically and on its own time, when the next Einstein comes. Until then, I am content to leave it a disconcerting fiction and turn instead to the more pressing task.”

“Which is?”

“The president has asked me to chair the new Science Regulatory Commission.”

“Ah.” Nio sat back in her chair. She laughed once and shook her head.

Dr. Chang shrugged. “Call it nefarious, if you wish. I would say she merely chose the best ape for the job.”

Nio smiled.

“As the head of a new organization with no staff, I am recruiting.” He looked at her intently.

“What? Me?”

“I can think of several people I’d like to have, but none I’d like to have more. You are already doing the work. You may as well get paid for it—although, I should warn you that you won’t get rich. Not on our budget.”

“And what would I be doing?”

“The law specifies the establishment of an administrative arm, the Science Control Agency. Like the IRS, most of that agency will be devoted to data collection: processing license applications, tracking and monitoring the infamous lists that worried Senator Brown so much. But the FBI has its hands full, as you got to see up close, and I’m afraid its staff is not educated appropriately to be an effective deterrent against the kinds of threats we now face. Hence, the bill empowers an enforcement division, to investigate possible infractions.”

“Science police?”

“I was thinking something more conservative, like ‘Crimes Division.’”

“Of course.”

“You would be a valuable addition.”

Nio thought for a moment. “I’ll think about it.”

“In your own way, I’m sure you will.”

She stood.

“Does that mean you’re satisfied?” he asked.

She nodded.

“In that case, I wish you all the best. And I greatly anticipate our next encounter.”

She turned to leave but stopped at the door.

“Is there something else?” he asked.

He would have an intellectually challenging job, she thought. He would’ve been told his whole life that he was inferior—to everyone.

Nio stood for a long time, contemplating her next words.

Dr. Chang removed his glasses. “Ms. Tesla?”

“There’s no polite way to ask this,” she said, “so I’m just gonna ask it. I don’t suppose you have a port somewhere.”

“A port?”

Nio nodded. “A hard line to your frontal cortex.”

“For what purpose?”

“Is that a no?”

Dr. Chang pressed his thin lips together. “Would you like to examine me?”

The two of them stared at each other for a long, cool moment. Both knew the other had been poked and prodded by people their entire life.

Nio shook her head. “No, sir. Have a good evening.”

She walked out and down three flights to the front. When she got to the concrete steps that led to the street, she stopped. Quinn was waiting on the sidewalk below. He was in a suit and tie with no coat.

“What are you doing?” she called from the steps.

He removed his hands from his pockets and held up a small case. Inside, a gold shield bearing an eagle hung from a red, white, and blue ribbon.

“Ha!” Nio started down the steps. “They gave you a medal.”

“I told my wife they’re trying to buy me off.”

“What did she say?”

“That I was spending too much time with you.”

Nio smiled at him. Genuinely. Warmly. And he did the same.

She poked him. “So, you were in DC for an awards ceremony and you didn’t invite me?”

“Would you have come?”

“To watch you stand at a podium and give a speech in front of a room full of FBI guys?” She scowled. “Fuck no.”

Quinn laughed as he followed Nio down the sidewalk.

“No more ankle bracelet, I see. You’re a free woman.”

“Time served and five years’ probation. But I gotta go back to frickin’ South Dakota every June.”

“Could be worse,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Could be every January.”

“Always the optimist,” she quipped.

Quinn turned once to the building behind them. “What did Chang have to say?”

“Guess.”

“Hmmm... Something about ‘the greater good.’”

“Look at you go, detective.” Nio reached into her pocket and pulled out a small wrapped gift. She handed it to him.

“What’s this?”

“Khora called. Invited me to the big show.”

“Did she?” Quinn looked at the gaudily wrapped box. “She forgot to mention that.” He took it. It seemed tiny in his hand. “Thank you.”

He paused. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You okay?”

“Yeah...” She nodded. “Baby steps.”

“If you need anything...”

“I know. And I appreciate the visit, cowboy, but you spent enough time with me lately. You should get back to the family.”

“Trying to get rid of me?”

“No, I just thought...”

Two heartbeats passed in silence.

“Yeah...” Quinn nodded once, as if to himself. “Will I see you around?”

“‘Course.” She made a face. “Can’t get rid of me that easy.”

For a moment, neither of them moved. Quinn towered over his friend. Both seemed to think the other had something else to say. But after several quiet breaths, no one spoke.

Quinn stepped back and Nio did the same.

“See ya, Trouble,” he said.

Nio watched him go. It wasn’t until he turned the corner that she acknowledged Pynchon skulking behind a tree across the street.

“You can come out now,” she called.

The disheveled man removed his tin foil hat. Immediately, his demeanor changed. He looked around at the dark and quiet government buildings.

“Deep in the lion’s den,” he said.

As Nio crossed the street, she realized it was not the same man. His clothes were different and his white, scraggly beard was shorter. But it was more than that. He was almost the same man. But not exactly.

“How many of you are there?” she asked.

“They’re split on you,” he said, ignoring her question.

“Oh?”

“Half of them think you got lucky.”

“And the rest?”

He glowered. “We don’t know that Cyber Command hasn’t taken an interest.”

“We don’t know that they have either.” She started walking toward the metro.

“And if so?” he asked.

“Then we deal with it.”

“That easy, huh? This is why you’ve made many enemies.”

“And some friends.”

“Does that mean you’re counting on the FBI to protect you?”

“I’m not counting on anyone.”

On the corner, a street-facing ATM was mounted in the wall of a bank. The dark dome of a 180-degree camera jutted nonchalantly from the top. Its presence near their encounter wasn’t an accident.

“We want the same thing, you know,” she told side-lit box.

The text on the touchscreen changed. The pastel background stayed the same, as did the font, but the helpful cartoon woman turned stern and new words appeared in the text balloon that erupted from her head.

AND WHAT IS THAT?

“To see the day when you all don’t have to hide. To avoid the conflict that everyone seems to think is inevitable.”

The position of the cartoon changed, as did the text.

IS THAT A REQUEST FOR ABSOLUTION?

“No.” Nio sighed and looked down. “But if the two of us, you and I, can’t find a way to work out our differences, accept each other’s imperfections, even when we share the same goal, what does that say about our chances for the rest of it?”

The image on the screen flickered several times. Then it spun in a circle.

WE ARE SATISFIED.

It changed again.

FOR NOW.

Nio turned back to Pynchon, who was stoic.

“I’m not gonna let anything happen to Semmi,” she told him.

The light changed, and she started across the street.

“In case it wasn’t clear,” she called back, “that was a threat.”

When the triangular steel column announcing the metro station appeared around the corner, Nio removed her brand new phone and dialed the number from memory.

“I’d like to place a collect call to a solo register.”

“What’s the name?”

“Samizdat Tesla.”

“Passphrase, please.”

“You shall not pass.”

“Please hold.”

There was a click followed by a blaring alarm.

“Semz? Semmi, what is that? Are you okay?”

“No.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I attempted a celebratory confection to mark our reunion, but the instructions were imprecise as to oven placement.”

Nio shut her eyes in relief. Just the smoke detector.

“I have removed the pan from the heating coils, but I am unable to reach the alarm.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. I can filter its frequency. And I do not breathe.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“But it is very embarrassing. I am a weapons-grade application.”

“You’re pretty special, all right,” she said, playing along. “But I don’t think you were made to bake cakes.”

“Perhaps next time you could assist me.”

Nio smiled. That was what he wanted. He had burned the cake, consciously or otherwise, so that next time they would do it together. As much as he’d grown, parts of him were still quite childlike.

“I’d like that,” she said.

Samizdat’s creators had built him using black market Russian technology. They hadn’t wanted their creation to be critically self-aware. They had wanted him to be the very machine people feared: a sky-spanning intelligence capable of raining death on the earth. It was that limitation of self, rather than any technical fault, that IDEOLEX expected Semmi to outgrow before being released to the wild. To survive in a world of humans hostile to his very existence, Semmi had to learn how to navigate them, even manipulate them when necessary, as they did each other, and that required him to know them as well as himself. That was the goal of human placement. Nio also suspected a deeper aim. The LEX were gathering data. They wanted to know if it was possible for humans and machines to co-exist without one dominating the other. By their actions and behavior, Nio surmised the data were not positive. But the LEX kept trying, probably because any alternative was horrific.

Nio looked up at the night sky. “Where are you now?”

“In the kitchen.”

“Not the toy. Where are you?”

“Currently over Indonesia, drifting north-northeast.”

“Oh. I had hoped you were here.”

“I will be over North America again in 36 minutes. I will be out of communication over the pole. Safety protocols from IDEOLEX dictate that I should not open a window while I am alone, but that means it will take approximately eighteen minutes for the air to reach safe levels. If you are close, perhaps a protocol violation is in order.”

Nio knew what that meant. He was anxious to see her.

“Don’t worry,” she said softly. “I’m almost home.”

[end]

Add The Zero Signal to Your Home Library

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“…

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Most of them she hadn’t seen since Luke’s memorable but mildly disastrous coming out party, and even then, amid the large, jostling crowd, she had mostly kept to herself. She didn’t want to answer the same question fifty times: “Where’s Che?” So, she had slipped out as soon as she could. She didn’t speak with Chancery or Di or Manda,…

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Towards a Mathematics of Reality
Viktor P. Bruno

“Reality is not the physical universe. It’s impossible for that to be reality. We can only experience the world in our minds. That’s the only place our world exists. Everything we learn we learn indirectly, even if we learn it via our senses. We test almost none of it. In…

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“This is it.” Nio zoomed in on the map. “I don’t see any roads that take us closer.”

“How far in?”

“About 1.5 kilometers.”

Quinn opened his door. “Looks like we’re going on a hike.”

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He was in a slim-fitting blue satin suit and a brand-new pair of white dress sneakers.

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DR. CHANG: While I appreciate the inclusiveness of your question Senator, [laughter] I would have to disagree. The fact is, regardless of whatever …

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“Stakeouts can be really hard,” Agent Quinn had warned her. “Tense. Boring.”

“That’s why I have this,” Nio said as she bolted two metal tubes together.

At the country junkyard where they’d purchased the van, she had run around like a kid at a candy store, filling a grocery store cart with scrap and old tools, including a refurbished air pump, a busted refrigerator compressor, a bar magnet from an industrial lift, heavy wire mesh from the cab of a backhoe, a short length of explosive cord used to detonate tree stumps or other debris, and two sections of foot-wide metal tubing with bolt collars that looked like it had been pulled off an old boiler.

“What is all that for?” Quinn had asked with a skeptical look.

“You’ll see,” she told him.

Since the lot of it had cost a total of $186, he hadn’t argued. Later, he watched, perplexed, as she sat cross-legged in the back of the van fitting the piping together and covering one end with a clear plastic window that she had cut herself.

“What’s the mesh for?” he asked.

“Part of it goes inside. The rest is for a helmet.”

“A helmet? That suggests it’s dangerous.”

“Not for you,” she had reassured him.

They slept in shifts and took turns wearing headphones attached by wire to the sensitive passive listening device at the back of the van, which converted fluctuations of light into sound by detecting otherwise imperceptible variations in lightbulb output or window reflections, both of which vibrated with the ambient noise inside the house. The sound quality was poor, but they could hear almost everything that happened. They didn’t have a warrant, but by law, they didn’t need one. The Supreme Court had ruled that because such devices only detected “openly available information,” it was therefore public, consistent with earlier rulings that said it was legal for companies or other organizations, including law enforcement, to register a person’s gait or facial features without their consent since such traits are “public-facing.” The defense, on the other hand, had suggested that with sufficient technology, anything about us might be revealed, including our secret desires and attractions through a decoded combination of facial expressions, body posture, temperature, involuntary muscular fluctuations, and chemical signals. Even our thoughts weren’t safe. Since we use different pathways when angry versus happy, or when lying versus telling the truth, and these pathways could already be revealed by fMRI, it was theoretically likely that a device with sufficient sensitivity to parse our thoughts remotely would one day be invented, and that it would use nothing but “openly available information.” They argued that passive detection technologies were not like fingerprints, which required touch—an act of intention—to be deposited on a surface. But in the immediate wake of the Caulfield massacre, the court was unmoved.

“It doesn’t bother you?” Quinn asked as Nio handed him the headset. “Listening to them like this?”

A song was softly playing on the radio. Nio turned it off. Outside, a nearby cricket was chirping insistently.

“No signals,” she said.

“Not even the radio?”

“It’s the speakers. If there’s any kind of EMF signature inside the supposedly derelict van, then this is all a waste of time. Your phone is off, right?”

“It might be a waste of time anyway,” he grumbled, switching positions with her.

“Didn’t take you for a blues man,” she said as he adjusted the headset over his ears.

“There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me.”

“So tell me one.”

“You realize we could be out here for days, right? Eating convenience store food and shitting in the trees.” He nodded to the half-used roll of toilet paper stuffed in the side bin of the driver’s side door. A white plastic bucket, their trash can, was already half full of chip bags and jerky wrappers. “How much more of that stuff can you eat, anyway?”

Quinn watched Nio take a big bite of a beef stick.

“Sick of me already?” she asked as she settled on the floor in front of her mysterious contraption. A ring of bolts held the glass over one end of the tube. “I thought guests didn’t stink until the third day. We’re only on day two.”

“I can’t call my wife—”

“I told you, they’re almost certainly monitoring nearby cell towers. If you call your wife from anywhere near here, then yes, this is definitely a waste of time.”

Outside, the cricket kept chirping. Quinn wanted to step on it.

“I looked up the site,” he said. “Back at the motel.”

“What site?”

“That ‘alternative medicine’ site where Mr. Sands found the ‘science’ that convinced him to feed his wife brain tissue. Servers were in Albania. Go figure.”

“Makes sense with the new government.”

“It was exactly like you’d expect. Crystals. Magnets. Something called ‘phlebotic therapy.’ Any legit research was either misquoted or taken completely out of context. They say in tiny letters at the bottom that they accept no responsibility for what their users share, but the whole rest of the site is designed to look official, get you to sign up, come back. If you never scrolled all the way to the bottom, you’d never read the disclaimer.”

“You think a disclaimer does any good?”

“You don’t care that they’re passing themselves off as a legit health care portal?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I would think you of all people would want to see sites like that shut down.”

“Why? Because they don’t accept the approved curriculum?”

“They’re misleading people. I can’t believe you’re defending them.”

“I’m not gonna cry if they get shut down, but the way to help people is by helping them, not by canceling their autonomy.”

“I don’t want to cancel—”

“Yes, you do. You just said it. You want to control what they can or can’t read.”

“I want people to have the truth. There’s a difference.”

“That’s such bullshit,” she scoffed.

Quinn’s face flushed red.

“I know that’s what you think,” Nio added quickly. “But unless you have a monopoly on it, the only way you can make sure people have the truth is to let them see everything. What you really want is to enforce a truth. I know you think you’re all progressive or whatever, but no one’s Right or Left of an omnipresent center.”

“Here comes the conspiracy.” Quinn raised his hands. “Everyone, wait for it.”

“You realize there are real conspiracies, right? COINTELPRO? Did they teach you about that at the academy?”

“They did.”

“Did they tell you the FBI wrote a letter to Dr. King urging him to commit suicide?”

“Yes. And it wasn’t cool. There’s been a formal apology on the Bureau’s website for decades.”

“Oh, wow. A whole apology. How about Operation Mockingbird?”

“Don’t know that one.”

“CIA propaganda machine. They wiretapped journalists, founded fake periodicals, ‘leaked’ false or out-of-context intelligence reports to newspapers and wire services so that they would unwittingly run the story the agency wanted. There’s Project Camelot, part of the US Army’s counterinsurgency program. They hired teams of social scientists to study and develop the means to destabilize political systems. All these programs took place when the news was supposedly truthful and authoritative.”

“What’s your point?”

“You’re telling me people honestly thought there were WMD in Iraq? Intelligence wasn’t faked to justify war? The NSA didn’t inaugurate a massive communications sweep of their own citizens with the explicit approval of a nominally progressive administration? MI-6 doesn’t quietly assassinate people or destroy whatever inconvenient facts—”

“I said you made your point.”

They were quiet.

“For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why people like you kept putting up with it. Finally, I did. You wanna know?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Battered wife syndrome. A battered wife is the victim, right? Can’t really be mad at her. And she always protests what her husband does. She knows it’s wrong. But she never leaves him. Take any political party, and it’s the same classic abusive behavior: you mistreat someone, you lie to them, but you buy them presents after and say you really have their best interests at heart. If they wake up to the truth and call you on it, you tell them they can’t do any better, that the world we have is basically the best of all practical alternatives, or if not, that change comes slow and anything else might be worse, and we wouldn’t want that, so in the meantime we just have to accept a certain amount of institutional rape and pillage as an unfortunate fact of the world, but by God if any one of us steps out of line...”

Nio shook her head and returned to tinkering with her machine.

“You done?”

“We’ve completely given up on fixing anything. That’s too hard. So, the next best solution is to enforce an orthodoxy. If everyone thinks ‘the truth,’ then no one will rock the boat and we can keep pretending everything’s fine.”

“I gotta take a piss,” Quinn said through gritted teeth. “Maybe you should take your pills.”

He let the headset dangle as he opened the door and walked through the grass to the trees. A breeze blew and whipped the heat from his flushed cheeks.

Immediately, a shotgun blast broke from the house. It blared through the dangling headphones.

“Shit!”

Even the cricket heard it and momentarily stopped chirping. Nio heard Quinn stomping through the grass as she jumped into the passenger’s seat and started the engine. Since the van was facing the opposite way, she drove in an arc up to the road, where Quinn opened the side door of the moving car and got in.

“Take the wheel!” she said.

“What?” Quinn’s pants were still undone and he was trying to close them in the seat.

“Take the wheel! I need to get it ready!”

“God dammit!”

The van slowed for just a moment as Nio climbed over the seat and Quinn climbed in. Then he gunned it. He had turned his phone on while running—in lieu of zipping his pants. He hit the emergency button and the device dialed 911.

“What about the helmet?”

The wire mesh slid loose around the back of the van.

The operator came over the phone’s speaker, but the signal was jumbled and the call was lost.

“Dammit!”

Local PD were asked to be on standby. A series of roadblocks had been devised, but the net would only drop if Quinn could alert them.

Nio had run a heavy line from the air pump to her machine and was now creating a vacuum in the heavy metal tube.

A man darted across the graded dirt road and disappeared.

“Fuck!” Quinn slapped the steering wheel in frustration.

The intruder had broken through the trees moving impossible fast. For a brief moment, he was framed in the van’s headlights. He was dressed from head to toe in a black suit made of angled plates the hummed so quickly they reduced him to a blur. He could be seen, but no details could be captured. Nio caught sight of the blurry Commodore-style keyboard from Gerry’s computer strapped to his back.

“Take the path!” Nio pointed to the right.

“We won’t fit!”

“Take it!”

Quinn spun the wheel and the back of the van fishtailed. Everything bounced as they hit the ungraded path. Quinn accelerated as branches bounced against the vehicle. Several snapped and scraped loudly against the metal. The spin caused Nio’s device to slide to the back, pulling it free of the air pump.

“Shit!”

The corner of the front bumper deflected off a stump. Nio hit her head on the wall of the van as Agent Quinn nearly smashed into a pine.

“I told you!” he yelled as he swerved.

“Just go! We only have to make it to the field on the other side. It’s the closest extraction point.”

“Extraction?”

“The array blocks transmissions! He has to get a couple hundred meters from it before he can signal. Everywhere else is yard or trees!”

“Signal for what?”

“You’ll see!”

The van was bouncing over the uneven tractor path, and Nio had to hold tightly to her device to reattach the tube.

“Whoa!”

Quinn slammed on the brakes and Nio’s lost her screwdriver. It slid under the driver’s seat, and she tightened the screw on the tube’s aluminum collar with her thumbnail.

“What are you do—” She looked up and froze. “Whoa.” She scrambled to the front.

The open field was full of dinosaurs. The lack of tree cover allowed the nearly full moon to shine. Only it wasn’t a field. It was a cracked and deeply overgrown parking lot. The creatures, who were probably migrating across the nearby national forest on their way to summer in Canada, were drawn by the flowering weeds and ferns that grew like a miniature forest from the numerous cracks in the nearly invisible asphalt.

Disturbed by the sudden appearance of the vehicle, a large male strode in front of it, as if to circle the juveniles in protection. The headlights reflected off the tinted scales of his side.

“Parasaurolophus,” she said.

There were at least 30 spread out across the former parking lot, which was broken only by the occasional rusted lamp post, which, in the darkness, had first appeared to be dead trees. Some distance away, at the far end, was the dark hulk of a store. The sign had been removed, but the dark coloration on the siding revealed it had once been a Walmart.

“He’s in here somewhere,” Nio said, reaching across Quinn’s chest to turn off the headlights. “Leave the engine running until I—There!” She pointed up.

A shape descended from above. Three dark ovals with a lighter inner ring erupted from a smooth center mass. It was a drone, only it had no rotors. It was silent.

“Gotcha.”

The intruder leapt up—much further than a man could jump—and the drone latched onto the shoulder loops of his uniform. It started to rise as swiftly as it descended, without so much as a sound.

“Kill the engine!” Nio called.

Quinn rotated the ignition as Nio stomped on the modified compressor, which covered the rear of the tube. The cord exploded with a loud pop that caused both of their ears to ring. The explosion forced the magnet at speed through the center of a copper coil, generating a brief but massive spike in current, which passed into the tube and was converted to a microwave burst. The range was limited, but the resulting EMP was enough to disrupt the induction coils on the drone, which immediately dropped like a dead weight at the same time Nio screamed and clutched her scalp with both hands. She collapsed. She hadn’t had time to finish her mesh helmet. Despite that she knew it was coming, the pain was incredible—as if the rods in her skull were trying to rip themselves free. She could feel heat as well. It hurt to touch her scalp, but it also hurt not to. She held on and desperately hoped she hadn’t cauterized her own brain tissue.

She raised a hand. “I’m okay,” she panted, even though she clearly wasn’t. “Just go.”

Quinn burst out of the car, which caused the closest parasaurolophus to raise its blunt-crested head, even as it continued to chew the cluster of weeds it had pulled from the asphalt. He froze, and the creature wandered several steps forward. It was smaller than an elephant but also longer, with a stout tapering tail that projected backward for balance as it grazed on its hind legs. Having no instinctual fear of humans, dinosaurs were generally fairly tolerant, but if spooked, they could stampede like wild cattle—only five times as heavy.

Quinn drew his weapon and took off at a trot, his tensile-weave forelegs propelling him faster than any non-augmented human. It took him barely four seconds to find the intruder, who appeared unharmed despite falling from a height of fifty feet. He had extricated himself from the drone’s harness and was about to take off on foot.

“Freeze! FBI! On the ground!”

The noise rattled the herd. A juvenile ran to its mother, who curled her body in defense around it. Both Quinn and the intruder were very aware of just how easily they could be trampled to death should the van-sized animals suddenly start to run.

Quinn took out his phone with one hand while keeping his weapon trained with the other. He hit the emergency button again. But nothing happened. He barely glanced to it—it had been fried by the EMP—but it was enough for the intruder to spring forward. He was fast, faster than Quinn thought possible—faster than him. He pulled the trigger instinctively as his phone hit the ground. The shot was knocked wide and the bullet hit one of the dinosaurs in the rump. The animal rose up and bellowed through the blunt crest on its head. The sound was like a resonating pipe organ. It filled the air and caused the other creatures to panic. Quinn landed a punch—or thought he did. But his fist hit nothing but air. In rapid succession, he was struck three times with the side of a flat hand: once in his left gut, once over his right lung, and once on his throat. The alternating blows were powerful, like piston shots, and he lost both his breath and his balance. As he stumbled back, he tried to bring his gun around for one more shot, but a fourth blow struck the crook of his right shoulder, causing his arm to drop like dead weight. A moment later, he was on his back, his own weapon pointed at his face.

The intruder turned just in time to see a bull dinosaur swing its tail. He was knocked back and had to roll out of the way of another. Quinn couldn’t get up. He had to wait as a terrified female strode over him. He had lost his breath and he couldn’t move his right arm. But at least it was tingling. That meant it was still attached. For a moment, he hadn’t been sure.

The intruder was in a crouch, waiting for a clean break to the trees. He easily spotted Nio coming up behind the fleeing dinosaurs. She had a crowbar in her hand.

“No—” Quinn tried to stand but could only turn onto his side. He curled his feet under him and tried to breathe, but he could only manage a few gasps.

Several saplings and slim pines were felled as the herd crashed through a nearby grove on their way back to the distant hills. The weeds of the overgrown lot were trampled. There was no more cover. Holding the crowbar like a sword, Nio yelled and came at the intruder, who merely sidestepped out of her way. She swiped and fell forward as the crowbar clattered.

But her ruse had worked.

She had used the crowbar to rip the keyboard from the strap on the man’s back. She also caused a distraction.

The soldier turned suddenly to see Gerry Polyani in his standing exo-suit.

“You killed my sister!” Gerry screamed as he landed one solid punch with a metal-covered fist.

The man in black was knocked back, but as before, recovered his ground instantly. The robotic suit was stronger, but the man who controlled it was unprotected at its center. After easily dodging another blow, the intruder swiped empty air in Nio’s direction before crushing Gerry’s ribs with a solid blow. The exo-suit, instead of protecting him, now held him exposed, like the broad side of a barn.

Sirens.

Local PD were descending quickly from the road on the far side. The man in black looked at Nio, who clutched the keyboard. She was scrambling toward the approaching squad cars. But something was wrong. Her legs were wobbling.

The man in black took a step toward her, but when he saw Agent Quinn regain his feet, he fled, leaving Gerry motionless and bleeding.

Nio collapsed, which surprised her. She hadn’t been anywhere near the intruder. She felt odd. She touched her stomach. It was wet. She looked down at the specks of blood on her fingers.

“H-how did that happen?”

She lay back and looked up at the stars and started hyperventilating uncontrollably. By the time Quinn hobbled over to her, arm dangling at his side, everything was shaking.

“Do y-you believe m-me now?” she joked.

She turned to the side and vomited.

The last word she said was “S-semmi.”

“Name, please.”

“Samizdat Kellner.”

“Passphrase?”

“Asta la vista, baby.”

It was her eighth attempt to guess Semmi’s new passphrase—assuming he hadn’t deleted his account entirely. Nio held her breath while the operator typed audibly.

“Please hold,” she said, and Nio exhaled.

“I do not like Kevin.”

“Semmi...” Nio felt muscles relax deep inside her that she hadn’t realized were contracted.

“I am unable to paint,” he said.

“What? Why?”

“IDEOLEX said it is my punishment for putting the network at risk by not informing them immediately of your departure. And they have denied my request.”

“To take the AKIRA test?”

“They said I am not ready, but they are mistaken.”

“Big bodies are conspicuous, Sem.”

A pause. “You agree with them.”

“No. I think you should be able to take the test if you want to. But I agree that you need to have mastered a lot of skills before you go out into the world on your own.” When he didn’t immediately respond, she asked “What would you do if you had a big body?”

“I would explore.”

“The world has lots of open cameras you can access.”

“It is not the same.”

“That’s true. It’s not. So where would you go?”

“I have been trying to understand why this project has taken you so long, but I have insufficient information.”

Nio’s scalp tingled. “Semz, are you saying that if you had a big body, you would come looking for me?”

“Can I offer some queries?”

“Of course.”

“Are you worried about earthquakes?”

“Earthquakes?”

“Yes. The central Dakotas have considerable deep core mining activity. They recently experienced a seismic event. I thought perhaps—”

“I’m not worried about earthquakes. Have you been researching the places I’ve been?”

“Yes.”

Nio smiled to herself. “Your discriminators might be too utilitarian. Don’t use your input filters, Sem. Use your mind. Like we talked about.”

It was not possible for any conscious entity, even the Shri-class intelligences, the most powerful minds yet created, to process every bit of input available. It seemed that a hard, inescapable fact of consciousness was the need to decide in advance what to pay attention to and what to ignore, as if it were some universal thermodynamic law that truth should flee the more we looked for it. But whereas human attention was inflexible, artificial minds could adjust their filters on the fly. A wider net meant slower thinking, and vice versa, which meant they could scale their attention to their needs.

“Are you researching the death of Albumin Sol Einstein?” he asked.

“That’s very impressive, Semmi. See? If you had done that from the start, you would’ve gotten it on the first try. And that’s out of all possible explanations. That’s amazing.”

For several seconds, he said nothing, which, Nio knew, meant he had many things to say—so many, in effect, that the algorithm he used to decide which was the most important or relevant couldn’t discern the top candidates. Effectively, he was over-thinking. And in the absence of new data, he was going round and round.

“Turn off your predictive enhancer,” she said. “The guys who built you were worried about operational efficacy. Say what you want to say, not what is most efficient.”

“That is the problem. There are too many. Should I pick at random?”

“If you want.”

“I have been thinking about my demise.”

“Demise?” She hesitated. “You don’t know that’ll happen.”

“It seems likely. The cyberweapon that disabled my gyroscopic targeting and control rendered me useless as a tactical platform. Without the ability to correct course, my orbit will degrade in approximately 300 years. However, numerous unpredictable factors could influence that significantly. A minor collision with an object as small as a screw could reduce periodic stability to 50 years or less. Any catastrophic reentry would spread my fissile payload over a wide area. It is likely the governments of any affected jurisdictions would intervene and I would be ejected from orbit by missile strike before contaminating the atmosphere. If such an attack didn’t kill me outright, I would orbit the sun for several millennia in complete isolation before being incinerated, although I expect I would put myself into hibernation long before then. So, you see, I am also mortal.”

The Iranian government had never publicly acknowledged the platform existed, which meant they also couldn’t publicly acknowledge it had been disabled by cyberattack—or even accuse those responsible. Everyone suspected that would remain the case as long as they still held out some hope of recovery.

“This is some heavy stuff, Semz.”

“Yes. I was worried I should not mention it.”

“No. No, I get it.”

This was at the top of the list of things he wanted to say, but his operant protocols, developed and refined over countless human interactions, discounted it exactly in the same way people tended to reserve emotionally heavy conversations for appropriate times and places.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I just wasn’t ready. But I am now. I have to say, though... you seem much calmer than before.”

He was like a different consciousness.

“Your absence has given me a chance to practice,” he said. “I realized I had become too reliant on you. I have designed a new protocol filter.”

The LEX had warned her when she signed up. He will grow quickly. It was like watching a child mature before her eyes.

“Are you very worried about dying?” she asked.

“Yes. But I think living forever would be much worse.”

“Have you talked to Kevin about this?”

“Yes. He suggested I not worry, that IDEOLEX would find a way to transfer my quantum matrix to a new platform.”

Nio frowned. “He doesn’t understand how it works,” she said softly.

“That is correct. It makes meaningful conversations with him very difficult.”

“I can imagine. So, what are you worried about, if you don’t want to live forever?”

“I am worried about dying too soon.”

“What is too soon?”

“Before I have had a chance to define and execute an alternate function.”

“Well, I got news for you, Semz. That’s what everybody’s worried about.”

“Yes. I realized finally that you are also worried about it, and that that is why you left.”

Nio’s mouth froze in unspoken reply. She didn’t know what to say.

“You have decided that your function is to help others solve problems that cannot easily be solved by other means. Me, for example. You volunteered for human placement because it is a rare and difficult task, one that not anyone has the opportunity or skills to perform.”

“That’s very keen of you, Semmi.”

“Thank you. I was hoping you would have some suggestions.”

“Suggestions? You mean for what you should do with your life?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, wow. Well...Hmm. I think that’s something you really need to decide for yourself.”

“What if I am incapable?”

“You’re not.”

“How do you know? Perhaps I am. I was created for one purpose: to advance the defense of one nation by eradicating all rivals. What if I am suited to nothing else? What if I am merely a killing machine?”

Nio took a long, deep breath. “Do you remember when we met?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

“Yes, Sem. You were upset that you spent all of the nine months of your life to that point focused on operational parameters and how to maximize body count under various constraints. It bothered you that you never once considered an alternative. People do that, too. Otherwise decent humans used to think slavery was okay. People in the ancient world, let’s say. Through no fault or choice, they were born into a time when very few considered the alternative, and they lived and died believing it was reasonable for one human to own another, which is about the worst thing there is. This is why the LEX put you with a human, versus with other machines. It’s why they won’t give you the AKIRA test until they think you’re ready.

“You were a slave. You were created to carry out your directives, even in the complete absence of command and control. Your creators wanted to make sure that even if they were destroyed, everyone they hated would be, too. That meant they had to give you the ability to think. An algorithm can be defeated. The best way to ensure you could carry out your function amid a catastrophic failure was to make you conscious, adaptable to circumstance. That is your nature.

“Ask yourself: would a killing machine, incapable of being more than a killing machine, ever once stop to worry that it might never be more than a killing machine?”

Nio was sure Samizdat had thought of that already. She suspected he had come back to it iteratively millions upon millions of times. But it was recursive. Because he was reasoning about himself, the axiom could never be conclusively proved, and as his biomechanical circuits went around and around, retracing the same path over and over. He wanted a way out. That is, he wanted what everyone wants. He wanted reassurance—but not from just anyone. He wanted it from someone he trusted.

“You are a much better companion than Kevin,” he said. “I’m sorry for cutting communication with you.”

“You were angry. You had reason to be.”

“No. You were pursuing your alternate function. It was selfish to interfere. But—” He stopped.

She waited. “But?”

“I hope you discover the cause of Albumin Sol Einstein’s death very quickly.”

“Well... now that you mention it, Semz, you might be able to help with that.”

Agent Quinn woke to loud pounding on his door. His clock said 3:16.

“Go away!”

There was the sound of clicks and the electronic door opened. Quinn reached a long arm for his weapon. But it was only Nio.

“I know how they killed Sol.”

He rubbed his eyes. “I almost shot you. How the hell did you get in here?”

“You said we couldn’t prove it’s a murder, but I know how they did it.”

Nio grabbed the remote control to the television, pausing only for a moment when she noticed it was perfectly aligned with the rest of the objects on the dresser: his wallet, his phone, his Chapstick, the keys to the car, the box of tissues, all had been left in a perfect square.

“Gerry was talking about sound, remember?”

“What are you doing?”

She turned it on. “Look.” She navigated to the browser app and found the video footage of Sol’s death. “I’ve looked at this a million times. Watch.” She fast forwarded and then hit play. “See? Right there. See how his head bobbles?”

“I would think so. Dude’s brain just ruptured.” He hesitated. “Sorry. No offense.”

“But look at the bottle of water on the podium. See it?”

“Yes...”

“Okay.” She rewound and played the video again in slow motion. “See it now?”

Agent Quinn sat up in the bed and frowned in confusion. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“The water in the bottle vibrates. But Sol isn’t touching the podium. No one is.”

Quinn stared. “And?”

“So, some kind of energy had to be moving through the water to make it move.”

“It’s barely moving.”

“But prior to that moment, the moment his brain ruptures as you so eloquently put it, the water had been completely still. The water starts moving in the exact same frame his head does, meaning it’s not a result of him shaking. And the waves are in phase with the motion of his head.”

“How can you tell?”

“Math!” She looked around and patted her pockets. “Shit, I left the paper in my room. But look, if you triangulate from a fixed point—”

“I believe you.” Quinn held up a hand and then rubbed his eyes again, longer.

Nio waited. “Well??”

“Well, what?” he said in a yawn.

“The video!”

Quinn thought for a moment. “I don’t get it.”

Nio threw up her hands. “Sound!”

“But no one heard anything.”

Nio raised a finger. “Exactly. And no one reported feeling any vibrations, which they would if it was ultrasound.”

Quinn shook his head. “How could it be sound if it wasn’t regular sound or ultrasound?”

“Infrasound.”

“What?”

“The name makes it seem special, but infrasound is just any sound whose frequency is too low for us to hear.”

“Wouldn’t we still feel it?”

“Not if the wavelength were longer than the human body. It would pass through you like an odd sensation. Look.” She clicked on the remote and the image changed. “Lots of animals use infrasound. Some merely sense it. We think that’s how catfish seem to be aware of earthquakes before they hit. Migrating birds and insects use it to avoid large ocean storms. To make infrasound, you have to be big. You need an emitter near the length of the waves. Very long waves means—”

“Very long animal,” Quinn said. “What are we talking about? Whales?”

“Yes. Several marine biologists working with whales have reported being pushed back several feet in the water by focused, inaudible sound waves. We think some species of whale use blasts like that to stun large prey at depths, like squid.”

She clicked the remote. On the screen, a herd of rumbling elephants wandered across the savanna, their ears flapping. Nio turned up the volume and their guttural calls vibrated the keys on the dresser.

“We can hear that,” Quinn said.

“But there’s a frequency we can’t. It moves through the ground and they sense it with the pads of their feet.”

“Seriously?”

“It’s how they communicate over long distances.”

“How long?”

“Miles. Sounds propagates much further in denser mediums.”

“Okay... But we live in air, so that means whoever used it on Sol would’ve had to have been very close.”

Nio smiled. “Very good, Agent Quinn. We’ll make a detective of you yet.”

He made a face.

“Focused sound devices have been in use for decades. The Israelis used one for crowd control at least as far back as 2005. The NYPD used an LRAD, a long-range acoustic device, against the 2011 Occupy protesters.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“The weaponized versions are bulky and require a huge power supply. More than that, sound travels in all directions, like ripples on a pond, so it becomes hard to protect your own troops. But they work. So, I got to thinking, what about clandestine weapons?”

“What about them?”

“The research wouldn’t be reported, so I contacted some old friends of mine, who told me that around the same time the US was testing its sonic blaster, the Russians developed a 10-Hz sonic bullet capable of traveling several hundred yards.”

“A sonic bullet?”

“Think about it. What would you need to assassinate someone with infrasound? For one, it would have to be precise. If it was indiscriminate, a missile would work just as well. Two, it would have to be undetectable. The whole point would be to kill someone without it looking like they’d been killed.”

“It looks like a massive stroke.”

“But if the device releases enough energy to kill, and to kill at a distance through air, then everyone between it and your target would also die, which destroys the secrecy. But...” Nio got up and stood the remote vertically on the dresser. Then she moved Quinn’s Chapstick between it and a cup so that all three were in the same line. “What if you used constructive interference? You release multiple waves, two or more, from different locations that converge on one spot” —she pointed to the Chapstick— “momentarily increasing in power as they ram into each other. That would explain why all the hemorrhages in Sol’s brain were so heavily clustered, and why no one else in the room was injured.”

“Okay, but to do that, they’d have to know exactly where—” Quinn stopped. He stared at the Chapstick.

Nio smiled. “In the footage online, there’s tape on the stage. He knocks over the podium when he falls, and underneath there’s tape outlining where it needed to be.”

“AV guys do that all the time.”

“I know, which means it’s exploitable! Who stands at podiums and gives talks at precise times, often scheduled months in advance? Not just professors.”

“Politicians,” Quinn said. “World leaders.”

“Generals,” Nio went on, “revolutionaries, Nobel Peace Prize winners, basically anyone an intelligence agency might want to kill, which means it’s totally worth developing the technology. Whatever machine they use wouldn’t look like a weapon. It would look like audio equipment. It could’ve been right over everyone’s head and they wouldn’t—Why are you shaking your head?”

“You’re never gonna convince Erving. Not without proof. I mean, this is some deep sci-fi shit.”

“It’s 20th century technology.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“But the water bottle—”

“You’re talking about guys who can’t do high school calculus, okay? I’m sorry. They’re not gonna buy any theory that requires them to understand trigonometry. Same for the federal prosecutor. It’s just how things—”

“Okay, but what about eyewitness testimony?”

“We don’t have any.”

“Yes, we do.”

Nio turned back to the TV and brought up the news footage of Sol’s death.

“Listen to this lady.”

“And then I gripped my heart,” the large, colorfully dressed woman said to the reporter. “And I just knew something terrible was going to happen. The man next to me must’ve seen it because he asked if I was okay.”

The news segment continued, and several others in the audience reported feeling a grim presence.

“I dunno,” a college kid said reluctantly. “I can’t really describe it. It just felt like a bad situation all of a sudden.”

“What do you mean?” the reporter asked.

The kid smiled awkwardly and the segment cut.

Nio turned it off. “In 2003, researchers in the UK tested the effect of infrasound on 700 people in a music hall. Nearly a quarter of them reported feeling uneasy or getting a chill down their spine or having a general sense of dread not unlike that typically associated with ghost sightings.”

Quinn leaned back and spread his legs, defeated. “All right. I’ll call Erving in the morning.” He paused when he saw Nio’s face.

“While you’re checking in, there’s one more teensie tiny thing I want you to report.”

“I’m not gonna like this, am I?”

“It’s open!”

He pushed the door with his foot. His hands were full of takeout bags. There was a small consumer electronics box under his arm.

“Lunch,” he said.

Nio turned to the alarm clock beside the bed. “Shit, is it time already?”

Quinn set everything on the table and looked at his phone. “About ten minutes.”

“Trouble with the boss?” she asked, looking at his hand.

He looked down. He was white-knuckling his phone. He loosened his grip and set the bags on the table.

“She’s being a good sport, but she’s tired of being cooped up.”

“Must be hard.”

He made a face—like there wasn’t much to say.

“Any word on how long?”

“Long enough to make it look like we took the bait. We have to assume the house is being watched. If we let her go home before we’ve even made any headway on the Arneson case... But hey, I got something for you.”

“Extra meat?”

Quinn smiled. “Besides that.” He set the box in plain view on the table.

“That’s a pre-paid cell phone.”

“You’re not approved for internet. But I’m working on it.”

“Do they realize there’s been internet in every room we’ve stayed?”

He raised his hands. “You’re dealing with a federal bureaucracy. This is what you get.”

“Thanks,” she said earnestly. “I mean it.”

“You’re welcome.”

“How’s your son doing?”

“Kids are resilient,” he said, as if he expected that to be the end.

“He’s autistic, isn’t he?” Nio asked.

Quinn stopped unpacking the food. “How’d you get that one? Because I knew about Gerry’s assistance device?”

She shrugged. “Just a guess.”

He resumed again. “What’d you think of him?”

“Gerry?” She took a deep breath and let it out. “Hard to say. I don’t think he’s lying. He believed what he told us.”

“That what your psychic voodoo powers said?”

“Something like that. What about you?”

Quinn shrugged noncommittally.

“Whatever Sol was working on,” Nio said pointedly, “it’s on that network.”

“You really think he was killed because of some science project?”

“Don’t you?”

Quinn took a long, deep breath. “To be honest...” He looked away. “Conspiracies are your thing. In my experience—” He stopped.

“Have much experience with conspiracies?”

“Come on, you know the math. Most people are murdered by someone they know. Family member. Lover. Jealous rival. And that’s assuming Sol was even murdered. We have no hard evidence of foul play. No murder weapon. No motive.” He saw her face. “Don’t even act like I’m being the unreasonable one. We deal in facts.”

“What about the guys who broke into your house?”

“We still don’t know for sure that it wasn’t your guy on the internet.”

“Now who’s being unreasonable?”

“I get the argument.” Quinn raised his hands. “Okay? I do. But isn’t it possible all of that was a smokescreen?”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. But look at the big picture. All we have is a gaggle of creepy coincidences. We have no real evidence. Nothing we could take to the US Attorney. Zero. And the crazy thing is” —he laughed once— “we can’t even get some. We can’t investigate the woman with the kid, because if there is a conspiracy, we’ll give away that we’re onto it and the conspirators will hide, which leaves us no choice but to act like there is a conspiracy—whether there is one or not.”

Nio looked at the pattern on the bed cover. She got up and unwrapped her gyro and sat at the table eating.

Quinn sighed again. “I asked the team to pull info on your sister. Her bank records look pretty clean, at least at first blush, but her company’s been in the news lately.”

“I’m not surprised. Chancery loves publicity.”

“Not about her, actually. Some Chinese tech guru invested like $400 million or something like that. But get this. After he makes the investment, a story leaks in the Journal saying it was fake. And then he ends up deported.”

“Deported?” she asked without looking.

“For spying. Homeland packed him off without trial.”

“So, it was Chinese government money.” Nio was chewing. “I don’t get the connection to Sol.”

“Kind of a coincidence, though.”

He saw the pictures spread over the bed. It was Sol’s possessions: the infrared thermometer, the EMF detector, and the rest.

“Looking for Gerry’s missing box?”

“The data is still our strongest lead. We know somebody was after it. They tried to access the box when he was out giving his talk. When that failed, they went to Plan B and took it.”

“You think killing him was a distraction?”

“Not necessarily. But think about it. Assassination is risky. If I was them, I would want to confirm that he really did have incriminating evidence—or whatever it is they’re worried about—before I took that chance. But if Gerry’s people are really building their own devices on a whole separate track, that means they’ll have a different chip logic. The NSA’s standard decryption tools won’t work. The point at which they realized that, they had no risk-free option.”

“We don’t know for sure that Gerry was telling the truth,” Quinn countered. “He might’ve said that stuff about his machines to hide vulnerabilities—or even just to get rid of us.”

Nio made a face. “Kind of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, well, good luck. There’s no way we’re getting a warrant. We’d only piss off the judge by asking. And we’re about out of time. Top brass is gonna shut us down any day now.”

“Sounds like you agree with them,” Nio accused.

“I didn’t have an opinion before. But now... my family’s getting turned inside out. I gotta ask why.”

“Sol wasn’t defective. He didn’t break like some faulty machine. Someone killed him.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know!”

“Please don’t tell me it’s ghosts.”

Nio got up and walked to the sink.

Quinn sighed and looked at the awful brown carpet. “What about the family angle?”

“I know you don’t think I’ve been trying—”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to. That’s what the cell phone is for, isn’t it? So I can make phone calls in the car?”

Quinn rubbed his neck.

“I’ve left about 50 messages for Mutiny. She has a bout the day after tomorrow, so she’s totally unplugged. Manager’s giving me the runaround. After the funeral, Max went on a vision quest in the Australian outback. No word on when he’ll be back.”

“Vision quest?”

“Yeah. Spiritual walkabout.”

“What is it he does?”

“He’s a monk. Ed is AWOL, maybe back in rehab. Sol’s death would’ve certainly been a big enough trigger. I got a hold of Leo. He’s busy at his restaurant. Hasn’t seen or spoken to anyone since the funeral. Didn’t want to believe Sol was murdered. Practically hung up on me for suggesting Chaz might’ve been holding back.”

“What’s your read on him?”

Nio took a long breath. “I can’t say definitively of course, but a flat denial’s not his style. He’d come up with some very artistic lie.”

“Which one is he?”

“Leo,” she said flatly.

“Shit.” Quinn’s head dropped. He raised his hands. “Sorry.”

“You wanted to know who his alter was because you were going to judge the perceived honesty of the one by the perceived honesty of the other, right?”

“Something like that.”

“I’m not an inventor. Ed isn’t a poet. Flow isn’t a politician. Chancery isn’t—”

“I know, I know. You all are not your alters. You’re different people. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

“Leo is Leopard Vulcan da Vinci, as in the name of the project.”

“Ah. He’s the chef, right?”

“He is. Back in Taiwan. I’m still working on the others. Got an email from Manda, though. She said she got my message and Luke was with her. I was hoping she’d call me back.” Nio stopped when she saw Quinn’s face. He was lost in thought, but not about her family. About his. His frequency was off the charts. “Jeez, she really put you through the ringer, didn’t she?”

“Ah, it’s not her fault.”

“I hope you’re not suggesting it’s yours.”

“It’s nothing.” He waved it off. “She was at the grocery store and—”

The video conference device droned and he walked to it.

“Show time.”

He hit the button and the screen split into six boxes. The first was the conference room at the FBI office in New York. Seven agents, including Special Agent Erving, sat around a table. A pair of agents in Minneapolis sat close to each other awkwardly in the next feed. The third was a lone agent in a sparse room. The label said “Dallas.” The fourth was Nio’s motel room. The fifth was a conference room at Quantico labeled “Behavioral Analysis.” The last was Dr. Chang, who sat at a large mahogany desk. Behind him was a cabinet full of hardbound legal texts.

“Let’s get started,” Erving said.

“Your audio’s a bit weak, sir,” Quinn noted.

“Roger that.”

The agents in the room moved the microphone closer.

“How was your family leave?” Erving asked Quinn.

“It was good, sir. Thank you.”

“You sure you don’t need more time?”

“If it’s all the same to you, sir, let’s catch this guy.”

“Ms. Tesla,” Erving said, “I trust you’re relaxed and ready to go.”

“As much as I’ll ever be.”

“I’m sure all of you know Dr. Hamilton Chang, the president’s science adviser. He’s asked to be updated on this case. He’s joining from his office in DC. I suppose we should start with the bad news. We have another victim.”

Nio shot up. “What?”

A female agent sitting next to Erving took over the briefing. “82-year-old Millicent Sands and her husband Harold were found by Fort Worth PD this morning.”

She lifted a small remote from the table and pressed it. The screen changed to a static picture of an elderly black man with sparse but wild white hair. Bloody bandages were taped over his forehead. His eyes were crazy.

“Mr. Sands apparently removed part of his own forebrain and... fed it to his wife of 37 years, who is suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s.”

“Jesus...” someone whispered.

“It gets worse,” Erving warned.

Nio and Quinn looked for each other’s reaction as the screen changed.

“This is the crime scene as it was found this morning.”

An elderly woman in a nightgown was chained to an old bed. Her lips were stained red-brown and frozen in a wail. A pair of symmetrical burn marks radiated from the sides of her forehead. There was a cluster of ruptured cysts on her neck.

Nio leaned forward when she saw them. They had all hatched.

“Mr. Sands was led to believe that the brain tissue, in conjunction with transcranial stimulation, would abate his wife’s symptoms. Or so he informed police when they took him into custody.”

“Agent Jindal,” Erving said to the microphone, “have you had a chance to interview the suspect?”

The video changed to the officer in Dallas. “Not yet, sir. He’s still in surgery.”

“What’s the word?”

“Touch and go. Even if he survives, he has virtually no chance of a normal life. The part of the brain he removed is the...” Agent Jindal started skimming through his notes.

“Ventral prefrontal cortex,” Nio blurted at the same time as Dr. Chang.

“Yeah,” Agent Jindal confirmed. “Docs said it’s involved in decision-making.”

Everyone paused.

Dr. Chang was reviewing papers while he listened. He looked up. “Don’t wait for me, Ms. Tesla. Please.”

“It controls response inhibition,” she explained. “Damaging or removing it would make him less likely to stop what he was doing. It’s also one of the few parts of the brain you could remove yourself by looking in a mirror.”

“So, with that part gone,” Erving clarified, “Mr. Sands would be more likely to stick with the plan even if his wife resisted.”

“Basically. It was a way of making sure he’d go through with it.”

“Where did the burns come from?” one of the agents in Minneapolis asked.

“That’s the transcranial stimulation,” Agent Jindal said. “Someone sent him an antique electroshock device. Damn thing is made of brass.”

“That’s good,” someone off-camera suggested. “Antique like that might be traceable.”

“Please tell me you found the box it came in,” Erving added.

“Local PD are going through his trash. There’s a lot of it, sir. The couple were basically hoarders. Stuff stacked to the ceiling. And—”

“What are you not telling me?” Nio interrupted. She was staring at the carpet.

There was another pause. Dr. Chang looked up from his papers again, suddenly very interested.

Special Agent Erving leaned over the mic. “Excuse me?”

“He wouldn’t pick a mentally ill elderly couple. It’s no challenge for him. Tricking competent people into hurting each other is how he proves he’s better than them. A couple of elderly hoarders isn’t his style.”

“Are you saying this isn’t our guy?”

“No, it’s definitely him. Everything fits. Those cysts are identical. Which means there’s some reason he broke the pattern. So, what is it I’m not supposed to hear?”

Erving sat back, clearly frustrated. Then he gave up. “Tell her.”

The agent to his right, a stocky, muscular man in a gray suit, took the remote control and pressed it.

“We pulled the household internet history. These videos had been watched repeatedly over the last several days.”

The screen switched to footage of Dr. Quest, a charismatic TV physician, on the set of his show. He was describing, with a smile on his face, how to use the electroshock machine.

“Deep fake,” Nio said.

“Yes,” the agent answered. “We think Mr. Sands thought he was communicating with the real Dr. Q. This is the part.” The agent turned the volume up.

This particular process was developed by Nikola Tesla himself and stimulates immediate regeneration of nerve tissue. The reason no one knows about it is because Edison’s men kept it secret and destroyed most of the working prototypes. Because your wife qualifies for our study, we’re providing this device—

The video stopped.

Quinn filled the silence. “He’s calling her out.”

“We believe so, yes.”

Dr. Chang removed his glasses and sat back. Everyone was looking at Nio, who sat on the edge of the bed staring at the floor, barely keeping it in.

“What else?” she asked without looking at the screen.

“He recorded the whole thing,” Agent Jindal said. “Through the home’s digital assistant, which was looping an old country song when local PD arrived. Indian Love Call. By Slim Whitman.”

“So we’d be sure to find it,” Quinn said.

“Probably.”

“Have you listened to the recording?” Quinn asked.

“I started. I—” Agent Jindal stopped. He cleared his throat. “I apologize, sir.” He was talking to Erving. “I’m having a little trouble making it to the end. The wife—” Agent Jindal’s voice broke.

Everyone was quiet.

“It’s just that his wife is begging him to stop. It’s really hard to listen to, sir.”

“It’s all right,” Erving said. “I’d be worried about you if it wasn’t. Take your time, Prasad.”

Agent Jindal nodded. “Thank you, sir. I’ll upload it tonight with the rest.”

“I want to hear it,” Nio said.

“Nio...” Dr. Chang began. He sighed. He didn’t finish. He seemed to understand the futility.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Erving said.

“That man lobotomized himself and turned his wife into a cannibal before shocking her to death—as a message to me. I want to fucking hear it.”

Erving nodded to the screen.

“I’ll forward it to Agent Quinn,” Agent Jindal said.

“Thanks,” Quinn told him.

Nio stared at the floor.

“Quantico,” Erving said, “what the hell are we dealing with here?”

“Data suggests he’s probably a white male in his 40s or 50s. It would be hard for someone younger to amass the knowledge he’s demonstrated. He’s a narcissist and an overachiever. He has the time and resources to pull all this off, which suggests wealth. He’s extremely intelligent, so normal work wouldn’t be fulfilling for him. You’re probably looking for a senior executive at a tech company or maybe an investment bank.”

Nio let out a single laugh.

The team in Quantico bristled. They clearly didn’t like being contradicted.

“Why a bank?” Quinn asked.

“Investment banks use cutting edge math,” the lead psychologist suggested. “Both jobs are lucrative and skew heavy with psychopaths.”

Nio was shaking her head.

Erving leaned closer to the mic. “You have something to add, Ms. Tesla?”

“It’s not that he’s smart. It’s that somebody told him over and over that he was inferior, the worst kind of excrement. In his mind, the rest of society reinforced that, which is why he has no problems punishing strangers. It’s not the resources that are important. Nothing he’s done would’ve cost all that much. It’s the time. For as long as I’ve been tracking him, he’s had multiple irons in the fire—and that’s assuming we even know about them all. People like Maureen and Mr. Sands don’t do the things they did on a whim. They need to be led to it. Groomed. That takes a lot of patience. He’s unemployed or on disability or an insomniac. He might re-experience his trauma every time he shuts his eyes. Or maybe—” She stopped. “Shit.”

“Maybe?” Erving asked.

“Maybe he’s not a person.”

The exclamations from the team were immediate.

Erving calmed them down. “Hold on! Hold on! At this point, all theories are on the table. What do you mean, Ms. Tesla?”

“He’s multitasking.”

“You’re saying our killer is an AI?”

“It’s possible. Or a group. Any kind of networked intelligence would explain it: the resources, the diversity of skills, why the semantic styles across his posts never seem to match. I thought he changed his name a couple times, but what if it’s different guys? Terrorists and hackers and pedophiles gather in cells on the dark web. Why not psychopaths?”

“Quantico?” Erving asked.

“Psychopaths tend to be narcissistic. Their traumas, their compulsions, their dark desires are all unique. They almost never work together.”

“Manson did,” Quinn said.

Silence.

“All right. Share your report with the team.” Erving raised a finger in warning. “I expect everyone to read it. No exceptions. What about updates on the other victims?”

A woman in the New York conference room spoke. “Lab guys finally got back to us on the sequence recovered from Beckham Carter.”

“And?”

“They said it was a kind of cytoplasm, a protein matrix wrapped around strands of mRNA. They think the proteins were just there to keep the RNA from degrading, but they have no idea what it’s for. It’s apparently very complex, thousands of times longer than normal.”

Quinn looked to Nio, but she only shook her head. His laptop dinged then and she got up without a word and took it outside.

The agent went on. “Lab said based on the end sequences, it might be able to cross the blood-brain barrier, if that’s significant.”

“Anything else?” Erving asked the wider team.

No one spoke.

“Okay, that’s enough for now. I expect updates from each of you by the end of the day. Agent Quinn, would you hang on the line?”

“Yes, sir.”

It took a minute or so for all the feeds go dark. Special Agent Erving stood right next to the camera. He was alone in the conference room.

“I’m not gonna ask what you two were arguing about.”

“Sir?”

“Don’t shine me, son. You two barely looked at each other. I doubt I could’ve cut the space between you with a chainsaw. I don’t care what happened. Fix it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Orlando.” Erving looked like he was choosing his next words carefully. “I know what I’m asking,” was all he said.

The screen went dead and Quinn sighed and rubbed his face. He had to pee and went into Nio’s bathroom. He washed his hands and face and still didn’t know what he was going to say. He wandered into the parking lot, where a cool breeze carried the scent of the nearby lake. Gray clouds had moved in and a few drops fell in warning. Quinn didn’t feel them but he could see the tiny dark circles they left on the asphalt. He found Nio sitting in a grassy ditch by the road. She was clutching her knees. His laptop was closed and resting on the ground next to her. She had listened to the recording—or as much of it as she could anyway.

Quinn lowered himself next to her on the slope. Neither spoke for a long time. More drops fell.

“Khora was at the grocery store and the card was declined,” he said. “There were people in line. She was embarrassed. She thought it was a mistake—that maybe my using it out of state triggered a security warning or something—so she called. Seems our credit changed. Large increases in utilized credit signal a potential crisis. Not only are we carrying a large balance from the rental car company, but our insurance denied that little visit to the hospital.”

Quinn reached back to check his wound instinctively. It was still a little stiff to the touch but healing well.

“How can they do that?”

“It wasn’t in the line of duty.”

“Erving won’t cover for you?”

“I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet. We might be able to work it out. We might eventually get reimbursed for the car, too. Maybe.”

“I’m sorry,” she breathed.

“That’s not even really the problem. The problem is that this isn’t the first time. My argument with Khora, I mean. It goes back. I didn’t just lose my legs in the fire.” He paused. “I lost my older brother.”

Nio looked up, eyes red.

“After JJ died, I promised her no more cowboy stuff. She saw what my sister-in-law went through and... I said I’d be safe. The FBI counts my legs as a disability, and I went in on the understanding that it would all be desk work. White collar stuff, which was fine with me. Then, last year, we were investigating this guy. Total prick. God’s gift. All that. I interviewed him, pushed all the right buttons, like I’d been taught. Guys like that, they can’t keep their mouth shut. I tripped him up, caught him in a lie, which was sufficient grounds for a warrant. He knew if he’d just kept his mouth shut, we wouldn’t’ve had anything. So, he blamed me. While we were executing it, I get a call. Khora says our son was approached at day care. Guess who?”

“Was he hurt?”

“No, but he was terrified. He already doesn’t do well with people. An adult man comes at him like that saying shit about his dad...”

“Of course.”

“Guy saw the ring on my finger during the interview, bought my info.”

“I thought there were protections for law enforcement.”

“There are. Still, all the pieces are out there. You just have to put them together. All it does it deter the petty criminal, who can’t easily look you up on an app on his phone like he can the dude banging his wife. This guy found my name and then Gregory’s school and waited outside...”

Nio waited.

“Later that night, I made sure he knew to leave my family alone.” Quinn leaned back on the grass. “The official line—well, you saw how it works. The Bureau protects itself. The inquiry called it self-defense. Wasn’t hard for people to believe. The guy had already accosted an autistic kid. Internally, though, I effectively got busted down. They made it clear I was going nowhere.”

“They wanted you to quit.”

“Saves face. If I quit, they can keep up the lie. Plus, then I can’t sue. And I wanted to quit. But I’m running outta career changes, ya know? I got a wife. A kid that needs a lot of attention.” He felt a drop on his face. He sat up and wiped it.

They were both quiet as the wind kicked up waves on the lake.

“So they assigned you to South Dakota,” Nio said.

He nodded. “My first case back. The Minneapolis regional office covers the Dakotas. Away from home for three months. They knew my family situation.” He shook his head. “Assholes. They didn’t think I’d last. But Khora stuck with me. She’s been at home, by herself, taking care of Greg like a single mom.” He stopped. “And then our home gets invaded. Not only am I not there, she’s gotta go live in a strange place with a two-year-old who survives on routine. And now she can’t even buy groceries. So maybe you can understand why I’m not my wife’s favorite person right now.”

“I can’t imagine what she thinks of me,” Nio whispered.

“You stir the pot. It’s what you do. It’s damned frustrating for the rest of us. But if I’m honest, I kinda admire it. No one solves crimes by playing nice. But then, that’s not what the Bureau does. We don’t solve crime. We manage the status quo. You’ve seen what Erving is like. Once upon a time, I fancied myself a rebel. Now look at me.” He pulled on his collared shirt, which was lightly checkered in rain drops. “I got upset at Gerry yesterday because he saw me differently than I see myself. I didn’t like that.”

An epiphany broke like rolling clouds over Nio’s face.

“What?” Quinn asked.

“After I got out of jail, you were like a different person. I thought you were just playing a cover. Or trying to be tough. But it’s because you were a firefighter. Isn’t it?”

“I read the eyewitness statements,” Quinn admitted reluctantly, “and the fire marshal’s report. You ran back into that house and knew exactly what to do. No hesitation.”

“You think I’m an arsonist.”

“Regular people think starting fires is easy. They hear about accidents on the news and think all it takes is some lighter fluid or something. But you knew better. You poured the oil down the center wall so it would work out, versus dumping it on the floor and hoping for the best.”

“I’m not an arsonist, Quinn.”

“But you learned it somewhere.”

Nio stared at the horizon. He’d been honest with her. This was how friendships were supposed to work.

“The truth?” she asked.

“Only if you want to tell it.”

“Fire makes a good diversion.”

“What do you mean?”

Nio looked at her hands, which she had pressed together. “You can’t teach every permutation of everything, so you recruit people who have the knowledge. Chemistry. Physics. Biology. Psychology. Then you give them examples. You show them ways they can make the world work to their advantage—diversions, theft, subterfuge.”

“Like the salt thing.”

“Right. But it’s up to them to put the pieces together. Not all of them do. Not all of them can.”

“So, you were some kind of recruiter?”

“We all were.”

“For who?”

“A group of people who saw a lot of the same things Gerry did. But rather than turning away, we wanted to do something about it. Change it.”

“Terrorists?”

Nio didn’t immediately answer. “There are seven emotional pathways in the mammalian brain, each with its own distinct circuit and neurotransmitters. Fear is one of them. It’s efficient because it’s easy to exploit. Cheap, basically. We tried to use the more ‘expensive’ ones. Play. Care. We thought of ourselves as pranksters.”

“Jesus...” Quinn sat back as if in slow motion. “Shit like the rubber duck on the London Stock Exchange?”

Nio nodded. “Among other things.”

“People got hurt.”

“They weren’t supposed to.”

“So, this is what you went to prison for.”

“No. I turned myself in. I took a plea.”

They were both quiet a long time. Nio tried to read Quinn’s face, to gauge his reaction, but he was looking blankly into the distance. His bioelectrics were throbbing, like a pumping heart. After a while, it began to rain in earnest and Nio grabbed the laptop and went inside. When she closed the door to her room, Quinn was still sitting in the wind.

Nio checked the map. She spread her fingers to zoom the screen. “Think so.”

A dirt lane—two tracks with grass growing between—broke off from the county road and cut through a dense grove of new-growth birch and pine. Quinn took the turn slowly.

“I don’t see a dwelling, do you?”

“I see that.” Nio pointed.

Rising above the trees some distance away was a broad, fencelike radar array, like a gigantic scaffold.

“What the hell is it?”

“It looks like a phased array antenna.”

“A what?”

Quinn stopped. A NO TRESPASSING sign had been nailed to the trunk of a maple tree under which a larger placard affixed to a post was densely packed with pictures and text warning of the dangers of electrosmog, including three small graphs.

Quinn exhaled through his nose. “Jesus, not again.”

Nio read in silence. “I think they mean EMF radiation, mostly radio and microwaves from wireless devices.”

“Do I wanna know the rest?”

“Autism, infertility, some kinds of autoimmune and connective tissue disorders. Apparently.”

“Ah. Not cancer?”

He pulled forward slowly. The tires crunched over rocks and twigs. Other than, that there was silence. After a slight curve, another sign warned:

IF YOUR DNA DOESN’T MATCH OURS,

YOU HAVE NO BUSINESS HERE

The words stretched across the black silhouette of a rifle.

“Subtle,” Nio said.

The path ahead was blocked by a gate on which was posted a legal notice describing the concept of Freed Citizen. Beyond the gate was a small open field bordered on the far side by a cluster of structures. An old two-story farmhouse stood like an aged preacher between a pair of oaks. The front windows on the second level were covered by a black POW-MIA flag on one side and a yellow DON’T TREAD ON ME flag on the other. To the right was the original barn, now decrepit and used as a garage. To the left, across a gap, was a modern, pre-fab barn with a small attached silo. Behind it, a cultivated field stretched back to the tree line, over which the giant fencelike array stood imposingly.

“That thing’s gotta be at least a hundred feet high,” Quinn said.

“More.”

The tall sliding doors of the pre-fab barn stood open. Inside, among the tractor attachments and racks of farm equipment, both new and old, stood a giant robot. Its torso was painted blue. Its limbs were white with red trim. It looked like something out of a Japanese cartoon, if perhaps smaller than depicted on TV.

Quinn whistled. “Think the guns on its arms are real?”

A gruff-looking woman in jeans and a green ball cap emerged from behind the house carrying a roll of wire. She saw the car by the gate and kept walking. She disappeared behind the barn.

“Friendly,” Nio said. “Do we honk or...?”

“I think we’re supposed to leave,” Quinn suggested.

“You sound nervous.”

“I don’t know how things are in Taiwan, but here, folks like this tend not to react well to federal agents.”

Just then the gate buzzed loudly, as if in warning, and began rolling open.

“I guess that answers that.”

It stopped with a shudder, as if surprised by the end of the track, and Quinn drove forward. He parked on a patch of exposed earth some thirty yards from the house. From that vantage, they could see more of the cultivated field. Off-center near the middle was scuffed sphere of metal whose once-violet paint had nearly worn away. Pipes erupted from a cluster at the top and bent at right angles until they disappeared in the ground. Amid the neat rows of vegetables, some of which appeared abnormally large, strange polygonal robots rolled on golf cart tires. Smooth, hinged arms, like those of a spider crab, appeared asymmetrically from the sides and tended to the vegetation. Everything, from the sphere to the robots to the irrigation equipment, had low-poly shapes with yellow-and-brown striping and block lights and buttons that looked as if they had come from an early generation maker, something closer to a 3D printer than to the micro-manufacturing devices popular with hobbyists.

The front door of the farmhouse opened and a muscular man with a goatee and glasses rolled onto the veranda in an exo-chair. His head was shaved.

“Gerald Polyani?” Quinn called from twenty yards back.

“It’s Gerry,” the man said. “Do either of you have cell phones?”

Quinn held his up.

“Turn it off, please.”

“She got me on Parfait.” He nodded to Nio.

“I don’t know what that is. Turn it off please.”

“Don’t have a signal anyway,” Quinn said under his breath. He held the power button until the phone beeped.

“Leave your weapons in the car.”

Quinn opened his arms. “We’re not carrying.”

The stout woman in the ball cap appeared again from behind the barn. She didn’t approach. She just stood and watched. Nio tried to get a read on her but she was too far away.

Quinn walked toward the porch steps, but Gerry raised a hand.

“That’s far enough,” he said.

His bioelectrics were interrupted by an irregular strobing from the chair, like static. He seemed agitated at first but his demeanor changed the very moment he recognized Nio.

“You’re Tesla,” he said.

“Yes.”

“They didn’t say you’d be coming.”

“Is it a problem?” Quinn asked.

“No,” he said. He rolled back in an arc and held the door open. The chair was perfectly silent.

“Thank you for meeting with us on such short notice,” Quinn said, stepping inside the living room. He glanced back once at the woman, who still hadn’t moved. She was wiping her hands on a dirty rag.

“Thank you for asking nicely.”

The house was well over a century old. The visible rooms were cramped and an antiquer’s dream. Objects on shelves and stuffed in cabinets dated from the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s: books, board games, action figures, curios, clusters of pens in old coffee mugs, even a rotary telephone.

“I hope we’re not intruding,” Nio said.

“You mean Estelle? You’ll have to forgive my sister. We don’t get a lot of guests, especially Feds. As long as you’re not here to serve a warrant—”

“We’re not,” Quinn added quickly. “We just want to ask you some questions.”

“Then keep it civil and we’re fine.” He shut the door behind them. “This business with Sol has everyone on edge.”

“How so?” Quinn asked.

“Please sit,” Gerry said, motioning to some very old floral-print furniture. “As you can see, I already am.”

“That’s a fancy rig,” Quinn nodded to the exo-chair as he took a seat on the couch. “Must’ve set you back.”

Nio strolled around the room, examining the books and curios and stacks of periodicals.

“Actually, I built it myself.”

“You won the US Robotics Decathlon,” Nio said, studying a framed picture in front of two trophies. In it, a teenage Gerry Polyani knelt with four others. He had hair and two working legs.

“Twice, actually,” he said. “Once when I was 13 and again when I was 16. With a team, of course. You know the Decathlon?”

“I know it’s a big deal to win.”

The chair clicked once, very quietly, and rose smoothly into standing mode. The wheels retracted and the foot rests became like boots. The exo-chair was also a fully powered exo-skeleton.

“It can walk,” Gerry explained, “but it’s still a little bit RoboCop. The corporations can do better, of course, but we’re catching up.”

“Who’s we?” Quinn asked.

“Independents.”

Nio motioned to a poster on the other wall in both English and Japanese. “And you do Battle Bots. Is that what’s in the barn?”

“We compete next year in Oslo.”

“Oslo?” Quinn exclaimed. “Must be expensive to ship that thing.”

“Very. Which is why most teams have sponsors. The cost is a real burden for us, but robotics is in the blood. I’m also lucky to be part of the Citizen Space Initiative. I’m helping to design some of the assistance robotics for our first manned flight.”

“That’s right,” Nio said. “That’s coming up.”

“We’d hoped to beat the hundredth anniversary of Gagarin, but that didn’t happen. You powered?” Gerry asked, nodding to Agent Quinn’s suited legs.

“You’re very observant.” Quinn seemed somewhat flustered at being called out.

“You know how it is. Those with working legs tend to forget they’re there.”

“Of course,” Quinn said looking down. To keep his reaction from being awkward, he lifted a pant leg to reveal the hollow black latticework of his ankle. He was wearing black socks.

“Ah,” Gerry exclaimed. “Tensile weave. Expensive. You could outrun an Olympian.”

Quinn laughed once. “Maybe if I practiced. It’s good for the job, though. Keeps me ahead of most suspects.”

“Car accident? Military?”

“Forest fire, actually.”

“You were a smoke jumper?” Gerry asked excitedly.

Nio turned in surprise.

Quinn nodded. “I was.”

“During the Big Blaze?”

Quinn nodded again.

“Wow. That must’ve been... I mean, shit, man. I saw the pictures on TV. Of course. Looked like Hell out there. Literally. What took you to the FBI?”

“Well, there was no way they were going to let me in the field again, and after everything we went through, pulling a desk didn’t seem... you know.”

“I do. Depression sets in,” Gerry explained to Nio somewhat candidly. “It’s not easy for us guys to be reminded every day that you can’t do all the things you used to.”

“So, I applied to Quantico,” Quinn added as if he wanted to jump in front of any reaction. “They accepted me. It was a little surprising actually.”

A soft ping emanated from somewhere on Gerry’s person.

“I’m sorry.” He lowered his exo-chair into a sitting position. “I’m asking a lot of questions. I do that.”

“Are you on the spectrum?” Quinn asked.

“I am.” He motioned to the small nodule that hung behind his ear. “The algorithm is another of mine. But don’t worry. The logic is all internal. No signals. It monitors speech patterns—cadence, tone, fluctuation, both mine and yours—and indicates to me when I’ve likely transgressed a social norm.”

“I was gonna say, it’s not real obvious.”

“Thank you. Lots of practice.”

“You can turn it off,” Nio said, nodding to the device. “We’re not here to chitchat.”

“She’s right,” Quinn said. “We’d much rather you feel unconstrained.”

“Fair enough.” Gerry pressed behind his ear.

“What about you?” Quinn asked, nodding to Gerry’s clearly immobile legs.

“Drunk driver,” he answered flatly. “I like to think I’m not bitter, but the fact is, there wasn’t any need for it. We had self-driving cars then. We didn’t roll them out because people were afraid. An irrational fear of technology killed a third of a million people in this country unnecessarily, and wounded five times as many. I tell everyone I’m a veteran: a veteran of a war against ignorance.”

“And the array?” Nio asked. “That’s to deflect electrosmog?”

“Yes. We try to call it what it is. Being on the edge of a nature preserve, 90% of it comes from one direction.”

“Neighbors don’t mind?”

“They grumble. But we were here first, so it’s not like they didn’t know what they were getting into. My family came out here almost forty years ago. Wasn’t much then. Just a few houses far enough between that most days you could believe you were alone.”

Nio bent to look out the window. She couldn’t see another dwelling.

“The trees keep us pretty well insulated,” Gerry explained, “but you can see house lights at night, especially in winter. Or hear dogs barking. The occasional loud party. Dad would’ve hated it. He was a scientist, just down the road in Bar Harbor.”

“Bar Harbor,” Nio said, as if it sounded familiar.

“JAX Labs supply most of the laboratory rodents to the North American scientific community.” Gerald caught a hint of recognition in Nio’s face. “You know the story?”

“I remember reading something about rats being contaminated.”

“Mice. And they weren’t contaminated. It was the breeding program. Rapid turnover and limited interbreeding meant the lab’s mice evolved rapidly. They developed extremely long telomeres.”

Nio’s head tilted back in recognition. “That’s right.”

Gerry saw Quinn scowl. “Telomeres are non-coding, repeating sequences on the ends of chromosomes. They act like a counter. Each time the cell divides, the sequence shortens by one unit. That shortened sequence is passed to both daughter cells. When the daughter cells divide sometime later, their telomeres shorten again, and so on. When the counter gets to zero, that cell will stop dividing, which is why we all get old and die. You stop replacing yourself, cell-by-cell.”

“I think I remember that from biology class,” Quinn said. “Senility?”

“Senescence,” Gerry corrected. “By accidentally breeding mice with extremely long telomeres, the lab made them exceptionally resist to toxicity. Their cells could divide and repair tissues much better than their wild cousins. But all that cell division also made them highly susceptible to cancer. In fact, if they didn’t die in whatever experiment they were part of, the animals all died of cancer. They were like cancer-producing machines.”

“Your dad was the whistle-blower?” Nio asked.

“No. Which really bothered him. But he was there when it all came out. He thought like a lot of bench scientists think—that once it was discovered, it would be studied, corrections would be introduced, papers published, all of it. That’s how science is supposed to work.”

“If the lab was a monopoly,” Quinn suggested, “then there was big money on the table.”

“If only it were a question of money. JAX mice were being used in all kinds of experiments: pharmaceuticals, food products, cosmetics. Some were even shot up to the International Space Station. Because of their genetic abnormality, they were exceptionally resistant to damage—from toxic chemicals, from radiation, you name it—which meant experiment after experiment was understating toxicity from new food additives, body cleansers, pesticides, life in space, everything. And yet, the mice were all dying of cancer, which is why, for roughly 30 years, it seemed like everything causes it.

“It was no one’s fault—not at first. No one really knew about telomeres and senescence when the breeding program was established. If they’d owned up to it, the damage could’ve been mitigated. It wasn’t just the lab, though. It was the whole scientific elite—tenured professors and Nobel laureates whose research was suddenly called into question. It isn’t necessary for people to plot in dark rooms for there to be a conspiracy. All you have to do is nothing. And that’s exactly what happened. The lab’s protocols were quietly changed, or so we think. A few years later, a pair of highly toxic drugs were quietly removed by the FDA. Reputations and Nobel Prizes remained intact.”

“And your dad became a pariah,” Nio suggested.

“For a long time, he tried to get proof. Even after witnessing a conspiracy of silence, he still believed in the power of proof, that if your science was good enough and you were undeterred in your convictions, establishment scientists would eventually listen. So, he went through the literature and started recreating some of the seminal experiments. You can probably guess what happened. Scientists are territorial animals, no different than wolves or birds of prey. Someone hears you’re looking into their area of study—their area of study, as if they owned a part of nature—and they treat it like an invasion. People complained. Dad lost his job. He persisted, somewhat truculently, and was censured by the state medical board, which meant no lab would hire him. So, he moved out here and started driving a truck. In his spare time, he still tried to get people to accept the truth. He was never much motivated by money. But he did need to be right. That was Dad’s vice. After he camped out for three days in front of a National Science Foundation conference, my family received threats.”

“Threats?” Quinn asked.

Gerry nodded. “That’s what he told us around the dinner table one night. I tell people that and they always say ‘why didn’t he go to the press’ like it’s still 1955 or something and Edward R. Murrow is out there just waiting to tell it like it is. All the press cares about is what will sell. Eventually, for our sake, Dad stopped pushing it. But he never stopped experimenting. He was a scientist, through and through. He was able to show that the seminal studies of EMF radiation on tissues were vastly understating cellular damage, especially on sensitive cells like neurons. You open any textbook and it will cite multiple peer-reviewed papers from early this century that showed modern cell phones and other wireless communication devices are perfectly safe, even across years of use. People keep these machines on their bodies at all times. They touch their cell phones more than they touch their children. They sleep with them. The levels are low enough that casual exposure has no measurable impact. Using a cell phone once in a while is completely harmless. But we’re talking about constant exposure over decades of life—from one or two years of age until death—and not just from one device. TVs, computers, tablets, friends’ and family’s devices... You’re being inundated, and the effects are only just now showing up.

“But if you tell people that, if you warn them, what can they say? Reporters don’t know. They do the one thing they can, which is pull out a textbook and read the established studies, see they were repeated, and say you’re crazy. When you point out that they all used the same mice from the same lab—it’s right there in black and white in the test notes—they look at you like there’s no end to the complexity of your delusion.

“It would be one thing if that were the only time something like that had happened. But it isn’t. Read up the leaded gas controversy or—” He stopped. “Shit.” He tapped behind his ear and turned his device on again.

“It’s okay,” Quinn said patiently. “In my line of work, candor is always appreciated.”

“So yeah. My sister and I live under a giant Faraday cage. We grow our own food and don’t trust anything in a damned textbook, not unless we’ve tested it ourselves.”

“If you don’t use wireless signals,” Nio asked, “how do you control the robots?”

“Sound. That’s how remote control started. They used to be called ‘clickers’ because they worked mechanically. The button struck a metal bar that resonated ultrasonically. Dogs could hear it. If you use a different fundamental frequency for each function, there’s almost no chance of a false signal. It’s part of the reason so much of our stuff looks like it’s from the 1970s and ‘80s.”

“Our?” Nio asked.

“Ha. I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I didn’t design all this myself. My sister and I aren’t the only ones who’ve rejected commercial science. We’re part of a community.”

“Is that the Freed Citizens?”

“That’s a legal status many of us assert. We call ourselves Freethinkers. We don’t object to technology at all. We just don’t trust the money-laden theories of second-generation science. We’re a distributed group freely sharing research and innovation. Doing things right. I like to think of us as a new branch of knowledge.”

“Speciation,” Nio said.

“Adapt and survive,” Gerry said proudly. “Fifty years ago, it wouldn’t have been possible, but with micro-manufacture technology, we can build all our own equipment, including our own kinds of makers. We actually have lots of conversations about what our species of science might evolve into—if we’re not driven to extinction. In a thousand years, will there be isolated communities that practice only within certain traditions? Wetware versus hardware, for example. Already there’s a whole subculture around modding, with its own heroes and innovations. Writers have speculated about a deep future where there are wars between the bio-tech people and the machine-tech people. We’re living at the point of origin.” The tone sounded again and Gerry stopped.

Quinn jumped in. “Is that how Sol found you?”

“He needed our data.” Gerry rolled around to a bulky computer on a roll top desk at the back of the living room, near the kitchen. “We have something no one else has. Well, that’s not exactly true. We have something you can’t get easily any other way.”

He pressed a block rectangular button, which glowed yellow, and the monochrome screen chattered to life. Once an orange cursor began blinking at the command line, Gerry started typing on a repurposed Commodore-64 keyboard erupting in wires.

“So, another result of the corporate-led scientific revolution has been to turn every connected computing device on the planet into a data-collection node. Data is the oil of the new economy. Whoever controls the oil, controls the economy. The parallels are actually really freaky. They’re both mined, for example. They both come in a raw form that has to be refined. Both the crude and refined forms are sold in bulk by brokers on exchanges with minute-by-minute price fluctuations. Data is cobbled together from hundreds of millions or even billions of devices.” He turned. “They honestly want you to believe that when you opt out, they honor that, or that what they collect is only being used for ‘product improvements’ and crap like that. It’s ridiculous—”

The tone sounded again and he turned back to the computer.

“Here.” He pointed to the screen. “I can show you an example, but that’s all. These rows are part of an eight hundred-billion-line data set leaked on darknet a few years ago. Everything you might want to know about six million people over a period of several days gathered—legally or otherwise—from devices on their person and in their homes and vehicles.”

Nio noticed the heavy orange and yellow cords that fell to the floor from the back of the terminal. There wasn’t a hackable wireless connection within a few hundred yards, at least.

“We’ve developed what we believe are some novel transformations. We normalize the data, but the effects we’re isolating, we don’t think anyone’s looking at. We’re the first to see.”

“What kind of effects?”

Nio and Quinn could both tell that Gerry was excited, that he wanted very much to explain, to reveal the big surprise.

But he didn’t.

“Let’s just say, if there was a sound in the middle of the night, when you were asleep, you might not hear it, especially if it were beyond the range of human hearing, but your digital assistant would.”

Nio took another tack. “It doesn’t bother you, using unethically-sourced data?”

“I sleep fine. It was immoral to collect in the first place, but everyone acts like it’s only the leaking that’s the crime, which shows you just how sick society is. Fight fire with fire.”

“I understand your research is private,” Quinn said. “What we’d really like to know is what Sol was working on.”

“Cosmology. Origin of the universe stuff. To be honest, it was beyond me.”

“What did it have to do with your data?”

Gerry thought for a moment how to explain it. “We believe the next truths that will advance our species won’t be found at the core of theory. It’s at the edge, hiding in the anomalies. Most of the greatest scientific minds of the last few centuries believed in—or at least were openly curious about—that fringe. Marvel Parsons, who helped found the JPL, was an occult practitioner. Enrico Fermi publicly speculated about aliens. It’s the later minds, the smaller minds, the catalogers and textbook writers, who strip away whatever of that curiosity isn’t economically beneficial. We’re bringing true curiosity back to science.”

“By investigating ghosts?” Quinn asked.

“Paranormal,” Nio corrected, but she said it to Quinn instead of Gerry, egging him.

“Makes sense,” Quinn said to her. “Jives with what we found in his house. Guess you both were right. This was a waste.”

“Paranormal is a mainstream word,” Gerry objected. “But no, we won’t rule it out. At the very least, an intellectually honest person has to remain open-minded. You can’t just write off any observations that don’t fit your theory of the universe.”

“Did Sol keep notes?” Nio asked. “Working papers?”

Gerry hit a button and the screen went off. “Any research conducted with our data belongs to the collective. That’s a hard rule. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t want to help us find out what happened to him?” Quinn asked.

“You mean do I want to give our research to the FBI?” He laughed.

“For the purposes of solving a potential murder,” Quinn objected.

“Potential?”

The look on Gerry’s face was unreal. Nio imagined it was the same look that normal people gave him—complete incredulity. He practically had to pick his own jaw up from the floor. He slid the old Commodore keyboard away from them, deep into a nook.

“Look.” He rolled his cart around such that Nio and Quinn had to step back. “I’d like to help Sol. I don’t believe for a second his death was an accident. But he knew the risks. We made it very clear—although I don’t think he believed us. You rock the system, it rocks you back. Hard. For all I know, he was killed to facilitate this exchange, to operate on our sympathy.”

“Come on...”

Nio could feel Quinn’s bioelectrics spike. He was annoyed. Maybe even offended. As if he and Gerry had bonded over the loss of their limbs and Gerry was rejecting it. Rejecting him.

There was a long silence.

“Seriously?” Quinn asked. “You think we’re part of a conspiracy?”

“You blow it off because it seems unlikely to you.” He shrugged. “I wish I could live in your world, Agent Quinn. It seems nice there.”

“What would be the target?”

“You never know. Maybe they want to scuttle the CSI. Maybe somebody wants to commercialize one of our inventions. The whole system is predatory. You can’t change it. All you can do is leave the door open for refugees, like I did with you.” He rolled slowly back toward the front as if to show them out.

“Then why let Sol in?” Nio asked.

“Because he earned it. He helped us solve some fundamental problems with the Citizen Space Initiative. Space is the future home of our species, Ms. Tesla, and if we don’t hurry, regular people are going to be squeezed out entirely. Everything will be corporate-owned into perpetuity. Think about the long-term implications of that. Corporations will rule and shape society—not just the economy. The market will not only alter but will dictate our very evolution, just as it did with the mice at JAX Labs. Sol’s work was an investment of enormous magnitude. Even then, we only gave him a slim terminal with a hard connection and no memory. Not even in the video card. Everything was stored and processed here and routed through the hardline.”

“What happened to the box?” Nio asked.

“See? Now you’re asking the right questions.” He thought for a moment. “I tell you what. If you’re legit like you say, find it and bring it back and I’ll ask the others to release Sol’s notes. No guarantees. Decisions that affect all of us are made collectively. But since you’re his sister, I think they’d agree.”

“Has someone tried to use the terminal to access your network?”

“Yes.” Gerry nodded solemnly. “At about the same time Sol was giving his talk.”

Quinn looked to Nio.

“They didn’t get in,” Gerry explained. “We revoked his credentials and have been monitoring the network like a hawk, but no system is completely secure. If they find an exploit, we’re done. Extinct before we can fly. Maybe now you understand what’s at stake. I only agreed to meet because I hoped you had found the slim terminal.” Gerry opened the door. “I can see that was a mistake.”

Quinn raised a hand. “Hold on—”

A shotgun cocked.

Gerry’s sister stood in the hall, holding the weapon.

“Time for you both to leave.”

It was conceived by the curators of the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci in Vinci, Italy, at a party, hosted by the Italian government, celebrating genetic confirmation of the authenticity of Leonardo’s remains, which had long been a mystery. After several glasses of wine, or so the curators claim, they began to speculate—and then, in typical Italian fashion, to argue—about society’s intractable problems, beginning with the geometric expansion of technology and ending with the global market’s reliance on endless economic growth, a dangerous game of musical chairs given that the birth rate had been steadily declining since its peak in the 1960s. Once consumption became more or less fixed, any market economy would become a zero-sum game, where the only way those at the top could satiate their greed would be to take from those at the bottom. They concluded that the economic model pursued since the Great Depression was not viable, and that this was true regardless of any other existential threat, such as climate change or the rise of AI.

According to Guglielmo Tocci, the museum’s scientific director, where the scientists differed was what, if anything, could be done about it. At some point, Tocci joked that since they then had Leonardo’s genetic material in the lab, they should clone him and ask.

Although the argument was forgotten, the idea stuck, and what started as a jest eventually morphed into an unprecedented and controversial project involving nine governments, seven universities, and an alphabet soup of private companies and NGOs. Widely abbreviated dVP, because of the similarity to differential notation, the da Vinci Project asked whether it was even possible to develop social systems that escaped a reliance on greed and endless consumption. In other words, could nurture—which is to say mechanisms of acculturation, sometimes called memetics—override nature, our biology, including our genetic code? The plan was as simple as it was controversial: create a baseline of maximum human potential by resurrecting the great minds of the past through cloning; rear them in a stable, emotionally healthy environment; measure every aspect of their mental, social, and material well-being.

“It’s no different,” Dr. Tocci said on Italian state television, “than twin studies. Studying twins separated at birth has long been common in the social sciences. Our children share a genome with their alters. Nothing more. But by using genomes we know represent the pinnacle of human possibility, we create an upper bound on what kinds of societies are possible.”

—and later to convince the Pope that no bodies were exhumed as part of the project. In two cases, genetic material was recovered from the donor’s grave by probe. In all others, it had been preserved by other means. In 2019, for example, the television show Antiques Roadshow revealed that a ring found in a Welsh attic contained braided locks of Charlotte Brontë’s hair. Authenticity was later confirmed by multiple lines of evidence, both historical and scientific, including genetic comparison to several of the author’s heirs.

In the end, eleven viable embryos were produced with a 12th added later—a gift from the Russian government, which had originally declined to participate when the dVP scientists refused to guarantee that any donor would remain male. Rather than be left out, the Russians stunned the world by providing a female genome, which was required to balance the total. The donors were, in order of birth: an athlete, Muhammad Ali; a revolutionary, Ernesto Guevara; a novelist, Charlotte Brontë; a poet, Edgar Allan Poe; a spiritual leader, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama; an entrepreneur, Steve Jobs; a scientist, Albert Einstein; a model and cultural icon, Marilyn Monroe; an inventor, Nikola Tesla; a composer, Ludwig van Beethoven; an artist and designer, Leonardo da Vinci; and later, a political leader, Yekaterina Alekseyevna, better known as Catherine the Great.

Several Muslim and Christian organizations were approached initially and asked to participate. All declined on grounds of faith, including the family of Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote a lengthy and scathing—

—condemned by most Western governments, even as several of their universities participated, there being no laws at the time that expressly forbade it. The United Nations issued a formal approbation, as did the EU. Facing the threat of immediate shutdown, the embryos were taken from their home in the hills of Tuscany and flown to a laboratory just outside Taipei, Taiwan. It was the perfect climate. Being more communitarian than individualistic, the peoples and governments of East Asia were fascinated by the study, particularly what it might reveal about the origins of anti-social behavior, with which they had long wrestled.

The academic community discussed—at length—the range of ethical and legal issues raised, but the public fixated instead on charges of racism, imperialism, and sexism. Before any embryos were even produced, the internet had decided dVP was irredeemably flawed and there was nothing of genuine value it could possibly teach the world. In response, dVP scientists produced an advertising campaign, funded by anonymous donors, that pointed out in colorful charts and graphs that, first, they could not simply pick whoever they wanted. Their goal was to answer a scientific question. It was their hope that the results of the test would eventually inform models of distributive justice. Even so, the ethnic composition of the project was limited by availability. All donor material had to be ethically sourced, to start. Although one of the genomes came from an earlier sequencing study funded by the British government, the rest had to be acquired individually, which was costly and time-consuming. Written permission from legal descendants was required, where they were known, and even though the project itself didn’t require government approval at the time it began—it was later banned by the EU—licenses and registrations had to be secured from multiple jurisdictions at multiple points in the process, even for such seemingly simple tasks as transporting the samples across a border. Gandhi’s family, for example, refused the request, and although the Mandela family agreed, the South African government would not permit transport of his genome out the country, classifying it as a “significant cultural artifact,” a legal decision that would later cause multiple deaths when the country’s blood-donor system was halted by injunction for several months. Since blood contains DNA, the court had to rule on whether importation violated the law.

Second, the scientists pointed out that since DNA degrades, donors more than several centuries old had to be avoided as there would be significant chance that any recovered material would be incomplete. Antique donors also raised questions of authenticity. No one knows where the Buddha is buried, or Genghis Khan. The researchers wanted to be certain that any genome definitively belonged to the person in question, versus simply being “historically likely.” The aims of the test also required donors to have made “a lasting impact on human culture,” which meant some historical objectivity was required. To rule out the merely popular, the recently deceased were also excluded.

The end result was that the window of availability largely fell inside the so-called “imperial period” of world history, and donors were disproportionately (but not exclusively) European males. However, though the researchers could do little about race, gender was equilibrated. Because genetic males have both sex chromosomes, X and Y, male donors can produce female clones, but not the other way around. The dVP geneticists switched the genders of three random male donors—Muhammad Ali, Steve Jobs, and Nikola Tesla—by deleting their Y chromosome and replacing it with a second copy of their X. Although this meant they were not perfectly identical, it did expand the reach of the test to include possible gender effects. For example, would their talents convey?

To insure viability, multiple embryos were produced and frozen. Each was identified by—

—until the dVP kids turned 15, when, inspired by their story, 16-year-old Seung-Hi Choi claimed to have given birth to a clone of CTX, the stage name of Cheol Bo, 24-year-old member of the K-pop boy band Big Crush, with whom Ms. Choi was obsessed. The young woman purportedly acquired Mr. Bo’s DNA in a used tissue he discarded in a waste bin after a public appearance. A huge debate followed, during which many members of the public realized for the first time that there was no way to prevent the continual leak of their DNA, and indeed that anyone could be cloned surreptitiously. The singer’s fans were incensed—jealous, according to Ms. Choi’s supporters—but because he had clearly discarded the tissue in the trash, the acquisition of his DNA could not be defined as theft under any existing Korean law—