nothing but the occasional strange cry of one of the zoo animals.
They were alone. Or at least it seemed that way. As he took a moment to look around, he began to glimpse movement. Bodies shifting behind trees, a flash of dull flesh from an open doorway to the rink, eyes watching them. He saw a shopping cart filled with belongings in the shadows nearby. Only the homeless of New York, come to hide in Central Park. They wouldn’t have any cell phones or machines for Doe to target, and they were used to blending in. They didn’t have a lot of personal information online to use against them. They might be the only ones left, Hawke thought, when this was all over.
Parked about ten feet away was a small Nissan pickup truck with the park name stenciled on its side, a maintenance vehicle of some kind. It looked at least thirty years old, its wheel wells peppered with rust, paint faded and dull and crisscrossed with scratches.
A vehicle like this wouldn’t have a satellite connection, GPS or OnStar. It wouldn’t even have an onboard computer system with any kind of access.
Hawke approached the truck carefully, watching for any signs of it being occupied. The last thing they needed was to have a squatter get defensive about their territory and attack them, or encounter another wild animal looking for a meal. But the truck bed contained a few empty plastic plant pots and scattered soil, an ancient shovel and some knotted rope and nothing else. The cab was empty, its vinyl-covered bench seat ripped in several places, stuffing protruding. He opened the door and sat inside, checking the visor, the ignition, the glove box, and found the key inside the cup holder.
It was perfect.
“What about that guy we just saw get shot in the video of that raid, he your partner in all this? Is that how it’s going down?” Vasco had recovered his breath and now stood a few feet away with his arms crossed, his face still flushed. “And those documents we just saw? What were those?”
The engine turned over several times and then caught with a squeal and a growl, the frame vibrating beneath Hawke. Through the windshield, he could see three grizzled men and two women who had emerged from their hiding places, their clothes ragged and hair long and shiny with grease. One man held an aluminum baseball bat in his hands, another a vicious-looking metal rake.
Hawke looked at Vasco and Young, who were still staring at him. “Get in,” he said. “Or would you rather stay here?”
Young sat between Hawke and Vasco. They took the pedestrian path away from the Wollman Rink, crashed through a low fence and went the wrong way down Center Drive toward the West Side. The truck shuddered and coughed, bald tires squealing as Hawke avoided an Audi that had spun sideways after crashing into a tree. The road was fairly clear, but he knew it would get cluttered when they neared the park’s borders. The Nissan had about a quarter tank of gas, plenty to get them to the Lincoln Tunnel. But the truck’s shocks were gone and the steering felt rubbery and loose, and Hawke wondered if the engine would even make it that far. He was pushing it beyond its limits. The truck didn’t even have a license plate and had probably only been used within the park itself for the past decade and driven not much faster than a runner taking a brisk jog.
He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw nothing pursuing them. Either the drone was still occupied, or it had gone off chasing something else. He took the next curve in the road a little too fast. Vasco had his hands splayed across the dash, bracing himself as the truck fishtailed and they slid across the vinyl seat before Hawke got it back under control.
“Take it easy,” Vasco grunted as Young’s body pressed into Hawke’s side. “I don’t want to die wrapped around a telephone pole.”
Hawke barely heard him. He was thinking back to his conversation with Doe, and the surreal nature of what had just happened continued to hit him again and again like a boxer poking at vulnerable spots, probing for a way in.
She had exploded out of hiding today, and Hawke had initially thought her goal was the extermination of the human race. But that didn’t make sense. She still needed power to survive, and human beings to produce it. People were vast consumers, but they also created the energy and devices Doe needed to exist.
Even the most rudimentary computer models of human population growth showed that the planet was on an unsustainable path. Doe would have run the numbers and extrapolated the results based upon Weller’s model of energy sharing.
It made a twisted kind of sense. And perhaps, Hawke thought, he had become one of her chosen fall guys.
“He never wanted to hurt her,” Young said. She was staring out the dirty windshield. “And he never really believed she wanted to hurt him. That was his weakness.” Her hands squeezed each other in her lap until her knuckles turned white. “It got him killed.” Her voice hiccupped on the last word.
“You don’t know that.” Hawke glanced at her bloodless face and then back at the road. “We’ve seen a lot of things today that aren’t true.”
“On a server in the cloud,” she said dully, fingers still intertwined, squeezing, twisting. “I’m sure she’s erased them by now. Jim had them pretty well protected, but there’s nowhere to hide from her.”
“They were still there when you accessed it at the hospital. Maybe we can get at them again.” He was grasping at straws, trying to find a way forward. “What about that case he was carrying around, the one the cops took? He seemed pretty insistent on finding it again.”
“I don’t know what’s in it,” she said. “I never saw it before.”
Hawke didn’t know whether to believe her or not. He had a feeling that whatever was in that case was important. But Young wasn’t talking. He tried another approach. “How can we stop her?” he said. “There’s got to be something we can do.”
Young shook her head. “We can’t,” she said. “She’s immortal, untouchable. She’s everywhere now. Unless…”
“What?”
“We’d have to convince the entire world to shut down,” she said. “Destroy every source of power she has, disrupt the infrastructure that carries it. Isolate her and choke her until she dies.” Young’s voice had grown more animated, but she quickly slumped back against the seat. “It’s impossible. We’d have to go back to before the industrial revolution. And if we ever started anything up again, she’d be there, like a dormant virus, waiting for us.”
“There’s gotta be some way to kill this thing off,” Vasco said. “Assuming what you’re saying is true. She was created by us, right? So why can’t we create something else to flush her out, or block her? Some kind of super security program, like a virus guard?”
The cab of the truck was silent for a moment. As blunt and bullheaded as he was, what Vasco had said made some kind of rough sense. Maybe he was finally coming around to the conclusion that Hawke had nothing to do with the attack after all. But Young sighed. “She’s evolved on her own,” she said. “That’s what the singularity means. She’s become self-sustaining, self-improving. She’ll always be one step ahead, and soon she’ll be vastly more intelligent than anyone else. We’ll never be able to keep up with her. Jim’s the only one—” She stopped, a trembling in her voice. “He’s the smartest man I ever met, and he knew her better than anyone else. But he’s gone. There’s nothing left.”
