He shook his head, true disgust in his voice as he spoke. “Lady, I don’t have one damn ounce of sympathy for you.”
“Samantha? Sam, it’s me,” Aldous suddenly said over her mind’s eye. “Don’t react. Don’t let him know you’re in contact with me.”
Samantha’s eyes were wild with astonishment.
“I thought you’d been killed, my love,” Aldous continued. “I’d never have left if I would’ve known that you were still alive. It’s bordering on miraculous.”
Aldous had escaped? The Purists had overwhelmed the complex? What did they want with her?
“You know,” Paine continued in his gravely voice, “I warned him about you. The day he gave his life to destroy all A.I. and save the species—I warned him. Goddamn it, lady. Your husband was a hero. How could you betray him like this?”
“Don’t listen to him, Sam,” Aldous cautioned. He’d stolen a Jeep and was now speeding through the mountain pass, away from Mount Andromeda and toward the nearest city. “That man is a killer. He executed more than a dozen people without a second thought. Listen to me, Sam. You have to get away. Whatever you do, you have to get away. He’s going to kill you if you don’t
She couldn’t reply, but her throat was too knotted with fear to speak anyway. She looked toward the open door. Why weren’t her powers working? If she could just fly—
Paine watched her eye line and grinned. “Heh. Want out?”
She looked up into his cold, lifeless eyes.
He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out the small, spherical MTF generator that had previously been inside her. He tossed it to her, but it slipped out of her hand, the surface of the generator still wet with blood and tissue, and rolled to the corner of the room. Paine laughed. “While you were recovering, I had to do a little impromptu surgery,” he said as he held the sharp fingers of his hand up like pincers to punctuate the point. “I think you’ve taken your last flight.”
18
“What time is it?” Craig asked the priest.
Befuddled, the priest looked to the master-at-arms, who pulled out his pocket watch.
“11:36 p.m.,” he replied.
“What time does the ship go down?” Craig asked the A.I.
“Go down?” the priest replied, pale and terror-stricken.
“It strikes the iceberg at 11:40 p.m., Craig,” replied the A.I.
“What?” Craig grunted in frustration. “Why didn’t you tell me? Jesus! Let’s go!”
“Craig,” the A.I. calmly began in protest, “I cannot help you interfere in this timeline. It would be highly unethical.”
“Unethical? You’ve gotta be kidding me. Letting more than 1,000 people die is ethical, then?”
“If you interfere here, Craig, you will open a Pandora’s box the likes of which you do not comprehend —”
“Just spare me, okay?” Craig shouted in return. “This is simple. We have the power to act, to stop a tragedy, so we act. Got it?”
“I cannot participate—”
“Fine, but don’t get in my way.”
The A.I. fell silent, but Craig remained floating in a stationary position just above the floor, still at the mercy of the A.I.
“Are you going to let me go?” Craig asked.
“I-I’m not sure I could stop you if I tried,” the master-at-arms uttered in response.
“I’m not talking to you,” Craig said. He pointed to his temple. “I’m talking to the computer in my head.”
“What the devil?” the master-at-arms reacted in dismay.
“Computer?” William Stead suddenly spoke, his head cocking as he shook a memory loose—one buried deep. “You mean, like a
Craig’s eyebrows knitted quizzically.
“A machine that computes?” Stead elaborated.
“Yes,” Craig answered, “a machine that computes.”
After a short moment of stunned silence, Stead finally guffawed. “Damn it, man, that’s as daft a notion as I’ve ever heard. A difference engine is nearly ten feet tall and weighs a ton.”
“It’s not daft,” Craig replied. “Remember this: when it comes to computers, the technology always gets a lot smaller and a lot more powerful—and in a hurry. And I’ll prove it to you, if the machine in my head will release me.”
“He’s out of his mind,” Stead whispered to the master-at-arms. “If he’s as powerful as you say, we’ve all had it.”
“You hear that?” Craig asked, speaking to the A.I. “Do I no longer have the right to free will? Can I not make choices anymore because you’ve decided to make them for me? Are you going to take that right?”
Another moment of silence passed. Then, suddenly, Craig lowered to the ground and his green aura dissipated.
“Thank you,” Craig said as he walked past the master-at-arms. “Tell the captain he’s about to hit an iceberg and this ‘unsinkable’ ship’s going to go down. If he turns now, he’ll give himself a chance.”
“That’s lunacy!” the master-at-arms fired back. “It’ll take a hell of a lot more than an iceberg to sink this ship!”
Craig shook his head. “That’s what I thought you’d say. Excuse me while I save your ass.” He pushed his way out of the room, then opened the doors to the outside deck. The night was moonless and dark, and the ocean was so calm that it appeared smooth, like a mirror. “I’ve never seen the ocean so calm,” Craig commented as he gripped the railing, preparing to launch himself over and into flight. “I can actually see the individual reflections of stars on its surface. It’s almost like glass.”
“They are in a massive ice field, but they do not even know it,” the A.I. observed. “Simple logic should dictate that water can never be this calm in the open ocean and that, therefore, the
Craig nodded. “Look, you don’t have to help me if you don’t want to,” he said in a low voice to the A.I., “but this would be a lot easier with some assistance.”
“You give me no choice, Craig. I’ll assist you in order to keep you from killing yourself and me in the process.”
Craig opened his mind’s eye. The A.I. had taken the liberty of setting the clock to synch up with the master-at-arms’s pocket watch. The display flipped from 11:38 to 11:39 p.m.
Suddenly, the lookout bell rang three times from the crow’s nest high above the deck.
“The alarm bell just rang!” Craig shouted.
“They’ve spotted the iceberg,” the A.I. replied. “If you intend to save the
19
Aldous gripped the steering wheel of the Jeep as the vehicle sped dangerously through the several centimeters of slush that still covered the road, despite the late summer temperatures. The nuclear winter had reduced the temperatures in the area by twenty degrees Celsius for the past decade and a half, resulting in winters so bitterly cold that they were nearly unsurvivable. The summer months, usually hot and dry beyond the mountain
