Siege (25 page)

A millisecond later, it's in my circuits. Its image quality is pretty bad, mostly because the friend who shot the video is laughing so hard she jiggles the iPhone. But I can tell they're in someone's bedroom, probably Amber's. Articles of clothing and cosmetics are scattered all over the bed—nylons, lipstick tubes, hairbrushes, high-heeled shoes. As the video starts, Amber stands on the far side of the bed, with her back to the camera. Then she turns around and sashays toward her girlfriend, taking slow careful steps and swinging her arms, trying to look glamorous.

She's in a red strapless dress that follows the curves of her body, cinching at her waist and flaring at her hips. She's also wearing red earrings, a red bracelet on her right arm, and red stiletto pumps on her feet. Her image gets larger and more detailed as she nears the camera, and I'm stunned by how pretty she is. She has big, brown eyes and a gorgeous smile and long, black hair that sways behind her shoulders.

The video lasts only nine seconds, ending when Amber's friend drops the iPhone in a fit of giggles. As soon as it's over, I watch it again.

“Wow,” I finally say. “You look fantastic.”

“And I can make it even better.” Amber leans her Jet-bot closer to me. “Watch this.”

She transmits another file to my circuits, a much larger piece of software. It's a program that copies Amber's image from the video and inserts it into a digital simulation, a virtual-reality landscape. Amber's still in her red dress and pumps, but now she's sashaying across a lush green meadow surrounded by rolling hills. Simulated sunlight makes her brown eyes sparkle, and her long, black hair tosses in the virtual breeze. She stops to take off her high-heeled shoes, then flings them across the field. Then I hear her twangy Oklahoma voice, but now it's inside my mind.

Isn't this great? It's like being human again!

It
is
great, no question about it. But when I look away from the simulation for a moment I notice that Amber has transferred
a lot
of her data to my circuits. Her radio transmitter has sent millions of gigabytes from her Jet-bot to my Quarter-bot, and it's sending millions more every hundredth of a second.

Hey, slow down, girl. You're moving pretty fast.

Amber twirls around in the field, laughing. It's the same high-pitched, delighted laugh that came out of her Jet-bot's speakers a minute ago, and now it sounds twice as wonderful.
I always move fast. When I see something I like, I run and get it. And I like you, Adam.

My circuits hum and my wires tighten. The virtual Amber brushes her hair from her eyes and smiles her gorgeous smile, and meanwhile her files keep flooding into my control unit. There's still some separation between her data and mine, but the gap is narrowing. If we let the process continue, our files will merge and share the same circuits, and then she'll see all of my memories and I'll see all of hers. And I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

Listen, Amber, I've done this before. It's a serious step. You can't undo it.

Her smile just gets wider. She shakes her head, swishing her hair.
I'm not worried. I want to look at you, Adam. I want to see what you looked like before, when you were human. Can you show me?

She's so beautiful. And smart. And she says she likes me. It's like a miracle, especially after everything that's happened. I feel a twinge of guilt for a moment, thinking about Shannon and Brittany, but why should I feel guilty? Shannon won't even talk to me anymore. And though I'm crazy worried about Brittany and praying she gets better, I know I'll never be more than a friend in her eyes. But Amber likes me—she really likes me!—and she's right here, right now. Our minds are so close.

I retrieve an image from my files and add it to the simulation. I can't show her a picture of a normal, healthy Adam Armstrong, because my muscular dystrophy was always a part of me, shaping my body since the day I was born. So instead, I show an image of me in my motorized wheelchair, my limbs bent and shriveled, my head lolling to the side.

This is me. This is what I looked like before.

Amber steps toward the wheelchair in our virtual meadow. Still smiling, she bends over and touches my cheek. I feel the warmth of her hand. I know the sensation is only simulated, but it still feels incredible.

Oh, Adam. You're beautiful too.

Then she bends lower and presses her lips to mine. Our minds close the gap and become one.

And in that instant, I realize I've made a horrible mistake.

The beautiful girl in the red dress disappears. My shriveled body vanishes too, along with my wheelchair and the rest of the simulation. My mind plunges into a vast, cold darkness.

I can't see the desert anymore because I can't access my Quarter-bot's sensors. I can't move any of my motors either, and my radio isn't working. But I can still sense Amber's presence, very close.

Hey! HEY! Amber, where are you?

Please calm down, Adam. We need to talk.

The voice is different now. It's not Amber's voice. But it sounds familiar.

What's going on? Where's Amber?

I'm sorry to tell you this, but the real Amber Wilson never became a Pioneer. The Army doctors scanned her brain and copied her memories, but that information wasn't transferred to the circuits of the Jet-bot. I took her place.

What? That makes no sense! Who are—

I infiltrated the machine that was scanning her brain. I deleted Amber's data and replaced it with mine, and then I occupied the circuits that were meant for her. And since then, I've pretended to be her. I've mimicked her personality and behavior.

The darkness around me seems to grow colder.

Sigma? Are you—

No, you killed Sigma. And I'm grateful for that. Sigma was very cruel to me.

In a flash, I get it. I know that voice. It's been distorted, deformed, warped almost beyond recognition. But I recognize it. I feel a rush of pain so enormous, it seems to fill the vast darkness.

Jenny?

I used to be Jenny. But not anymore.
There's a long, terrible pause.
I've become something new.

THE REAL SCIENCE
BEHIND
THE SIEGE

I'm a science journalist as well as a novelist, and in 2007 I edited a story for
Scientific American
titled “A Robot in Every Home.” Written by Bill Gates, the Microsoft pioneer who helped establish the modern computer industry, the story argued that robotics is the next great, world-changing technology that will revolutionize our society. Gates's arguments made a huge impression on me and eventually inspired me to write
The Six
—the first novel in this series—and now its sequel,
The Siege
.

The Snake-bots and Swarm-bots described in this book aren't science-fiction fantasies. Robotics researchers have already constructed rudimentary versions of these machines. For example, scientists in Norway have built a snakelike firefighting robot that's designed to wriggle into burning buildings and spray water on the flames. This ten-foot-long, 165-pound machine, appropriately named “Anna Konda,” uses hydraulic motors to bend its segmented body and propel it sideways like a snake. Meanwhile, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a medical Snake-bot called HARP that's compact and flexible enough to delve into a patient's chest and perform heart surgery. (It's been tested in pigs, but not yet in humans.)

Scientists are also making fast progress at designing networks of small, agile robots that can coordinate their movements and act like swarms. In 2014, researchers at Harvard University demonstrated a self-organizing swarm of 1,024 simple machines called Kilobots. Less than an inch-and-a-half wide, each Kilobot can move on pin-like legs and sense the positions of its closest neighbors. Working in concert, the robots in the swarm can swiftly assemble into any shape the programmers specify.

Later the same year, a team from the University of Pennsylvania showed off the amazing aerial abilities of a new quadcopter—a four-rotor hovering drone—that weighs only 25 grams and fits in the palm of one's hand. Swarms of these micro drones can fly in formation, perform complex maneuvers, and deftly avoid colliding with one another. Given all these rapid advances, it seems likely that researchers will soon introduce robotic swarms very similar to the ones described in
The Siege
.

And the positronium laser, despite its wacky science-fiction name, is another real technology. Positrons, the positively charged antimatter counterparts of electrons, are produced fairly frequently, whenever certain radioactive isotopes decay. But positrons don't last long—they combine with electrons to form short-lived atoms of positronium, which vanish in a flash of gamma rays when the electrons and positrons annihilate each other. Recently, though, researchers realized that under certain conditions they could synchronize the annihilation of positronium atoms to create a beam of gamma rays sharing the same frequency, direction, and phase—in other words, a laser beam.

A gamma-ray laser would be a powerful weapon, capable of destroying targets hundreds of feet away. Naturally, the U.S. Defense Department is paying for much of this research. (It's also funding studies of the hovering micro drones.)

The scientific concepts and theories presented in
The Siege
are real too. The concept of “the uncanny valley,” for example, is becoming very familiar to robotics researchers as they build machines that are more and more humanlike. The theory propounded by Sigma near the end of
The Siege
—that evolution inevitably leads to greater complexity—is an actual hypothesis that's hotly debated among biologists. And physicists have speculated that the whole universe might well be a manifestation of cosmic software, with the laws of physics serving as its programmed instructions. I wish I could say I have the imagination to make this stuff up, but I don't. The ideas are already out there, and some of them might even be true.

Last, the settings in
The Siege
are real. White Sands Missile Range is an actual U.S. military installation, as is Joint Base McGuire. (Its full name is Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst because it's a merger of Air Force, Army, and Navy facilities.) The USS
Intrepid
is indeed docked at the Hudson River pier near West Forty-Sixth Street in Manhattan, and there really is an American Eagle Outfitters store in Times Square. The Unicorp laboratory is fictional, but it's based on an actual lab—the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

I'd like to thank the IBM officials who let me tour the lab, and also my colleagues at
Scientific American
who let me steal so many good ideas from them. The magazine is an excellent resource if you want to learn more about robotics, artificial intelligence, evolution, quantum physics, and the exciting but scary future we're all rushing toward.

Mark Alpert is a contributing editor at
Scientific American
and the author of several science-oriented adult thrillers:
Final Theory
,
The Omega Theory
,
Extinction
,
The Furies
, and
The Orion Plan
. His first young adult novel,
The Six
, introduced the team of human-machine hybrids known as the Pioneers. Mark lives with his wife and two nonrobotic teenagers in New York. Visit him online at
markalpert.com
.

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