Brain Jack

“You do, you die,” Dodge said.

“Either way, same, same,” Sam said. “Let’s at least go out fighting.”

“What the hell are you guys talking about?” Jackson shouted. “We have less than three minutes before a nuclear holocaust!”

Dodge said, “We’re trying one last thing. If it works, you’ll know about it. If it don’t … well, you’ll know about that too.”

His fingers were already flying across the keyboard. “We need to leave the core transmission systems open,” he said. “Just shut down the protocol stack to prevent the execution of the browser DLLs.”

Jackson turned away and fired at something out of sight.

“Whatever you’re doing, do it now. We can’t hold them any longer!” he said.

Three soldiers joined him, aiming and firing their weapons out through the open door of the control room.

“Let’s give it a burst, then,” Dodge said.

Sam reached for the headset, but a viselike grip caught his arm.

“I was talking about me, not you,” Dodge said.

Sam said, “But …”

Dodge had already taken the headset and was pulling it down over his head.

“But nothing,” he said, and plugged it in.

The effect was instantaneous. It was as if he had stuck a wet finger into an electrical outlet. In a way, he had. Except it was his brain, not a finger. And it was not an electrical outlet. It was the entire neuro-network, millions of brains all intertwined, plus the vast database that was the Internet itself.

Dodge’s body jolted as if under a massive electrical shock, and his eyelids began to blink, impossibly fast. His eyes rolled back in his head, showing only the whites, and his mouth fell open, emitting a harsh gagging sound. His fingers splayed outward, bending back on themselves like the branches of a small tree in the wind, and his hands brushed feebly at his head, uselessly scraping at the headset with the insides of his wrists, trying to unseat it.

Sam reached for the plug but it was already too late.

Dodge’s head fell forward, cracking on the front desk of the control panel. His eyes slowly rolled back to center, and the stretched tendons in his body began to relax. The horrible gagging sound stopped also, for which Sam was grateful. It was a hideous, stomach-turning sound.

Dodge sat on the chair, slumped forward onto the desk, his breathing barely discernible. Blood from a cut on his head ran red fingers across the biohazard tattoo on his forehead.

“We’re getting an unload signal.” Jackson still had the radio to his ear, and his voice was frantic. “Oh my God, they’ve opened the bomb bays.”

There was a sudden explosion by the doorway, and one of the soldiers was lifted bodily and hurled backward by the blast, flying across the room behind them.

Sam snatched the headset from Dodge’s lifeless form and jammed it down harshly over his own head.

“Bomb release, bomb release,” he heard Jackson scream, far, far away. “Multiple inbound nukes!”

Sam shut his eyes.

57 | BIRTH

It took a moment before anything happened. As if the universe needed to draw a breath.

There was just blackness, and in the blackness, without the guiding hand of the neuro-browser, he was alone, suspended in the void.

Sam barely noticed the dot at first, just a tiny pinprick in the blackness. It grew and resolved itself into a tiny spiral of light; then that began to grow, larger and larger until it consumed all his vision. Still it grew, a massive vortex of stars roaring toward him or sucking him toward it—there was no way of knowing which. And then the implosion, the impossible implosion of everything there ever was, all at once.

He was a young boy on his first day of school in South Korea and a retired stockbroker in Amsterdam.

He was a Greek shipping billionaire, bloated, bored, and choking on excess and an elderly woman on her deathbed in Vancouver.

He was everyone and no one.

He was the world and they were him.

It was information beyond any hope of understanding. Assimilating. Processing.

The very cells of his brain seemed to quiver as he fought against the deluge, the tsunami of images, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, memories, knowledge.

There was no hope. There was no way.

No human being could withstand this.

This much he did finally understand amidst the torrent, and even with the realization that he could not possibly cope with the overload came the realization that it was already too late to shut it off.

Sam gave himself over to the neuro-network, knowing as he did so that the person he was would be gone— forever. The cells of his brain shook violently, faster and faster, then exploded in a fury of starburst and blinding light.

He did not resist. He stopped trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, to understand the impossible, to stretch out and touch infinity.

He let go, and the world flooded inside his head, and he screamed and screamed again and again.

He became the network. The network became him.

58 | DEATH

There was no Ursula.

There never had been.

They had given her a name and a gender, spoken of her as if she was human, but that was nothing more than a way for their tiny, pathetic human brains to try to cope with the concept, with the simple idea of a collective consciousness.

All that existed was a vague sort of awareness; he realized that now. A glimmering of life. A basic understanding without purpose or reason.

Without a soul.

It was aware of him. He knew that too.

He felt its fear roll over him; he felt it recoil from him and then lash out at him with needlelike fingers of the purest poison.

But he was beyond that now. The fury and power of its attack were no more than the out flung hand of an infant, an instinctive defensive reaction from an embryonic being.

He accepted its fear, and he took its fear, and there was fear no more.

Then he moved toward it, and without fear it accepted him, it embraced him, and then it was gone, and there was only him.

That had once been called Sam.

59 | SAM

He saw the soldiers burst into the control room with their weapons held high. He was the soldiers bursting in through the doorway and the billowing smoke. But even as they entered, their orders changed. Their weapons were lowered.

He was the commanders of the B-2 bombers, and he was the bombers themselves, closing the bomb bay doors with gentle hands and turning the flying machines back onto a course for home.

He spoke to the bombs that were already falling, reaching out through the radio-guidance