Legacy of a Mad Scientist (30 page)

“Sir, I will have you know that I completely respect
the chain of command, despite my refusal to be shackled by it.”

“Back to my original question, why are you here?”

“I have a proposal for you sir, but it will require a
bit of explaining first.”

“I’m all ears.”

“The Centaur Project, sir. I want you to turn it back
over to me.”

“Most of my staff consider you to be the number one
threat to this administration, if not the Republic as a whole. And
now you have the balls to come in here, uninvited, and ask me to
give you the most powerful weapon in the nation’s entire arsenal.
Are you out of your mind?”

“Funny you should ask that.” Fox smiled.

“Funny how?”

“Well, your nephew has taken me prisoner.”

“You don’t appear imprisoned.”

“And you’ve been allowing uninitiated users on the
Micronix Network.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“You’ve been linking your footnotes.”

“Well, of course I do, but those are my copies.”

“The National Intelligence Director and his deputy
both have access to your annotated files.”

The president’s face fell. He raised his hand to his
mouth. “Oh my God. Fox, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize…”

“It’s okay. It’s my fault. I should have come to see
you as soon as you were inducted into office. It just didn’t seem
appropriate.”

“No, that’s okay. People were still, are still,
sensitive about what happened in San Diego.”

“I can’t say I blame them, but General Cruthers was
far more responsible than I was. I gave Stagwell’s administration
what they asked for. I created the world’s safest weapon.”

“The concept is impossible. I think that’s what they
couldn’t see. After San Diego, the people wanted a change. It’s
okay that you didn’t visit. I understand. You were too strongly
identified with the past. And besides, I made the decision to use
your technology without talking to you first. I thought I knew what
I was doing.”

“I know the feeling.”

“At any rate, I trust both Joe and Rudy. They’ve got
the Republic’s best interest at heart.”

“Yes, well, they seem to think my death is just what
the Republic needs right now.”

“Look, Doctor Fox, I wanted to meet you the other
day, but I was running late and after you stormed out of here,
well, I apologize for anything my nephew may have done. Yes, Joe is
my nephew, and if he has taken the law into his own hands, he will
see justice.

“However, he presented his case the other day, after
you insulted my Chief of Staff and stormed out, and I have to tell
you, he was rather convincing, plus he’s got Senators Miller and
Clarke backing him.

“Of course, Secretary Croswell unraveled every
argument with kindergarten logic. He even called him out for
chasing a personal vendetta against you. I can’t recall the last
time I saw this much passion over anything.”

“Well, I’m cutting Stanwood out of the loop,” Fox
said. “Consider this a courtesy call.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Before I continue, do you have any questions for
me?” Fox asked.

“Just one. Is it true, can you detonate terillium
with a thought?”

“No, absolutely not. Never could, completely
untrue.”

“But it’s theoretically possible?”

“Anything you can put into words is
possible
,
even if only as a clever fraud. But I can’t do that, no.”

“The Micronix has opened up a lot of other
possibilities though, hasn’t it?” Conway asked.

“Yes, Sir,” Fox replied.

“I have a couple of ideas that I’d like to run past
you,” Conway said.

“Okay, go ahead, sir.”

“One is a seed vault, and not just seeds, but
everything, I want to duplicate the sum total of all of mankind’s
knowledge and learning and put backups around the solar system, in
case something happens here, some kind of disaster.”

Fox smiled. “Did you know, that every time you use
the Micronix, it runs a back up, on you?”

“You’re kidding?”

“Not at all.”

“Have you noticed, you never forget anything?” Fox
asked.

“Never.” Conway smiled.

“Did you think that was you?” Fox grinned.

“Well…” Conway sputtered and laughed.

“Didn’t it start right after you took office?”

“I suppose it did…”

“How much do you know about the Centaur Project?”

“I admit, I was curious. I mean, you won the war in a
single afternoon. It was over, there was no denying that.”

“But have you ever wondered how we got to that place,
technologically.”

“The press on the tanks was pretty
straightforward.”

“That was a smear campaign and full of half truth and
lies. You understand that there were operators wired into the
tanks, the Centaurs?”

“Yes, that much was clear.”

“Well, sir, what you may not realize is that the same
nine operators were wired into all ten thousand of those
machines.”

“I’m not sure I follow, doctor. I thought only seven
went online.”

“Yes, Sir, that’s correct. My point is, how do I say
this… We didn’t have pilots on standby. We…

“Project Epsilon, the mess that started all this,
that was forty thousand convicted prisoners and some scientists, a
tragedy, to be sure.

“In San Diego, the number was somewhere around one
million two hundred thousand. A massacre, a genocide, a mass
execution, committed by seven individuals, members of the 3AM
Bodyguard program, also the core members of the Black Willow Team,”
Fox said.

“How can that be possible?” Conway asked. “How can
they be in two places at once? I mean; those soldiers were dead.
They all died, hundreds of them, correct?” the President asked.

“Thousands,” Fox answered. “However… Well, we started
project 3AM at the same time as the Black Willow trials. We
graduated the same team through both programs, straight into the
combat exercises and fast tracked them out into the field.”

“Explain.”

“3AM was billed as the search for the perfect
bodyguard, to that end, we offered wounded soldiers a second
chance, outfitting them with cybernetic prosthesis.”

“I heard about that.”

“Unfortunately, legal oversight decided to handcuff
us. They tied up the project with a maze of red tape and
bureaucracy, so we capped the program after a dozen subjects and
had the files sealed.”

“Right, you moved onto the AIs and ran your Black
Willow simulations with robots, correct?”

“Kind of.”

“What does that mean,
kind of
?”

“Well, we never perfected the AIs.”

“I think the disaster in San Diego was proof enough
of that.”

“No, I mean, we never perfected them at all.”

“Then how did Black Willow and the 3AM Trials even
take place?”

“Well, during 3AM sir, we referred to the solution as
Remote Intelligence,” Fox explained.

“What does that mean?”

“Sir, it means I cloned those ten soldiers about a
thousand times each, and we ran our fatigue-slash-failure tests
that way.”

“I don’t think I get you,” Conway said.

“I think you do sir. The same ten operatives
conducted the 3AM field tests and all the Black Willow operations,
in newly minted bodies, outfitted with quantum streaming recorders.
We didn’t usually run doubles because of signal interference
issues, but it’s easy to run several copies of a single agent, in
series, until the mission is successful. When one of them gets
taken out, a second is activated with same objectives and the new
memories.”

Fox explained. “On all the ops I ran, I never lost a
man.”

“And the by product of this technology is that anyone
scanned into the bank with corresponding DNA can be
reproduced?”

“It takes six months and about thirty million in
blue-goo to grow a new blank from scratch, but essentially, yes.
And we never sent originals into the field, but you get the
idea.”

“Is that who you are, right now, a copy of a
copy?”

“Not at all. The Doctor Fox you see sitting before
you is an illusion, projected into your consciousness over your
amplifier.”

Conway smiled. “You’re saying the reason Secret
Service hasn’t kicked in the door, is because the camera can’t see
you, because you only exist in my head?”

“That’s right.”

“So what, the secret service thinks I’m talking to
myself?”

“Not at all. This conversation is happening much
faster than you can physically move. You aren’t speaking to me with
your mouth and lungs, but with your mind.”

Conway raised an eyebrow.

“Go ahead,” Fox suggested, “Put your hands on the
desk, just lay them out flat.”

Conway set his hands on the desk, but much to his
amazement, they didn’t move. Instead, ghost-like images of his arms
slipped out from his physical limbs and set themselves on the
desk.

Fox smiled and held out his hand.

Conway took it and stepped out of his physical
body.

“This is called astral projection.”

“Makes sense,” Conway said.

“Now watch this.” Fox clapped his hands together.

A brilliant flash of light erupted from his hands. As
he pulled them apart, he lifted the left one high and kept the
right low.

Fox and Conway’s astral selves rocketed out of the
Oval Office and away from the White House, into the upper
atmosphere of the planet.

They floated in orbit, hanging above the world.

In the distance, the Sun illuminated all.

The moon glowed over their right shoulder and
satellites hung scattered across the horizon like anti-gravity
traffic over Angel City.

“This is amazing,” Conway said, looking around
them.

“
Mankind is on the precipice of
something big,” Fox said. “All we have to do is try and understand
that.”

All Conway could do was smile.

“I just figured out how to do this a couple of days
ago. I was telling some friends, Stanwood’s kidnapping me is the
best vacation I’ve ever had.”

Fox pointed to a series of satellites in the
distance. “I’ve only seen those from the inside before.”

Fox leaned toward the satellites, pulling himself and
Conway toward them though force of will alone. “You see, once
you’re scanned by the Micronix, if you can personally manage it,
you can run lots of equipment from the inside. There’s still some
pretty significant glitches and roadblocks, but I think Dr. Te has
made some real progress recently.”

Fox and Conway reached the satellites and slowed,
drifting past the giant communication machines. “These guys serve a
few functions, but one of them is the data stream. Packets are
received, compressed and broadcast from here, out to the asteroid
belt, which we’ve saturated with storage mirrors.”

“Good man,” Conway said.

Fox turned toward the President and looked him in the
eye. “He’s going to try and kill me you know.”

“Let him,” Conway answered.

“Are you serious?” Fox asked.

“It doesn’t seem likely to hurt you. And you can’t
charge someone with murder just for thinking about it.”

“You have a point there,” Fox agreed.

“So you come out of a coma a few months down the
road, what’s the harm?” President Conway suggested.

“Meanwhile Stanwood cleans up, appropriating
everything I own?”

“They say possessions are an illusion,” Conway
countered.

“You can’t take it with you, I suppose,” Fox
replied.

“Besides, it will give you plenty of time to work on
the vault.”

“I do want to save as many as we can.” Fox smiled,
excited.

“How easy can you make the process?” the President
asked.

“We just cracked that one, it’s as easy as taking a
photo now.”

“Fantastic! That’s great.” Conway smiled.

“Yeah, but thirty million is still a lot,” Fox
said.

“Someday the price of Terillium will go down, but not
until we find more of it. I can see that this will be how we do
that,” Conway said.

“With your permission sir, that’s what I want to talk
to you about. I was thinking we could repurpose the Centaurs.”

Fox gestured to the space-barge they slowly drifted
toward. The tanks looked to each be unique, yet all were
reiterations of similar concepts; propulsion systems, armor and
guns.

“What did you have in mind?” Conway asked.

“Well, we only launched seven of the ten thousand
delivered. I propose we launch a significant number of the rest of
them out to the hammered bracelet and put them to work mining
precious metals.”

“Where will you get the pilots?” Conway asked.

Fox laughed. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell
you. They’re all manned. They have pilots wired in, all set into
suspended animation. They’re uniquely suited for this other
purpose, besides war.”

“We could construct factories right there,” Conway
said.

“That’s what I was thinking sir.”

“This is a brilliant idea, Fox.”

“I wish we agreed about the Stanwood situation as
well, but I do understand your approach. I’ve already given my men
the order not to fire until fired upon,” Fox said.

“Isn’t that common practice?” Conway asked.

“If it were, no one would have had to issue the
order, centuries ago.”

“Point taken. I should be getting back.”

“Yes, sir.” Fox brought his hands together, and they
were back in the oval office.

“That certainly is an amazing device, I can see why
Joe is so afraid of you.”

“He doesn’t even know the half of it.” Fox
smiled.

“At any rate, I’m glad you came by,” Conway extended
his hand.

Fox took it, and they shook. “Me too.”

“And you don’t have to be afraid of Joe. I’ll have a
talk with him.”

“I’d appreciate that, sir.”

Conway stepped back into his body and shook his
head.

Dr. Fox waited to be sure he was okay.