secret demands had military implications. Worldwide military implications. His crowning achievement, Perseus, had been working literally twenty-four hours a day on some of the questions put to Darius by Abu Assiz, an old classmate now grown very powerful in the government. Abu had some notion of what Darius was up to, but his knowledge of the progress already accomplished was severely limited in scope.
The plain fact was, no one in Tehran or even on earth had the faintest notion as to what Darius and Perseus had achieved, nor would they ever, until it was too late for anyone to do anything about it.
The unceasing and sheer number of questions from his government and a secret cadre of mullahs were far beyond Darius’s mental capacity to absorb. But no question on heaven or earth was beyond his creation, Lord Perseus the Magnificent.
Many times in his long life he’d felt like putting a bullet through the damn thing (his mind), just put it out of its misery. But then the questions: What happened to his soul, his animus, then? Where did it go? Would he go with it? Would his bullet have been wasted? Would his “soul,” God forbid, prove his eternal undoing, condemn him to the cacophonous prison dwelling inside his head?
These, of course, were questions he could only discuss with his friend. But first, they’d have to deal with the latest military demands made on him and his team of AI scientists.
And thus this visit at the glorious crack of dawn. A spirited discourse with the only intellect he had recourse to that was superior to his own. That august entity whose existence was known only to him and who was known only as Perseus.
H e gently reversed the thrusters when he reached the end of the steel-decked dock, coming to a gentle stop two feet short of the water. There was no boarding ladder up to the yacht’s deck, nor was there need of one. No one save Darius was allowed to board this vessel, and the guards who kept watch over it had orders to shoot to kill any intruder.
He touched a remote switch on his armrest keypad and a large section of the yacht’s white hull slid back hydraulically. It revealed a stainless-steel room about the size of a large elevator. In fact, that is just what it was. He nudged the joysticks forward and whooshed inside. Then he pulled back on the left control and rotated 180 degrees, so that he was now facing the door, hovering about three feet off the polished steel floor.
This once luxurious yacht, which he’d renamed Cygnus, was not at all what it appeared to be. A decade earlier Darius and a team of naval engineers had totally gutted the vessel, removing the engines, fuel tanks, interior bulwarks, mahogany furnishings, everything, thus turning it into an empty shell. Working underwater to avoid the prying eyes of American satellites, divers had then sliced Cygnus ’s keel open from stem to stern with acetylene torches and winches.
The new “mother ship” was opened just wide enough to accept a new “baby” vessel inside its belly.
The Koi class sub was a Chinese-built two-man submarine. Sixty feet in length, she had been offloaded under cover of darkness from a Russian freighter in the port of Akatu and had arrived off the Ram Citadel days earlier. Powered by a completely silent proto-lithium battery engine, the sub was capable of surprising speeds. After careful maneuvering, the little sub had surfaced inside the yacht’s empty hull. The hull, now fitted with hydraulic hinges, had been reclosed, the water pumped out.
Cygnus was no longer a wealthy gentleman’s yacht. She was simply a brilliant disguise for the fully functioning submarine in her belly, with an underwater speed of thirty knots. Darius thought that should be sufficient should the time ever come when he needed to make a speedy escape from his compound.
He knew, deep in his gut, that that day would surely come.
Cygnus, his bizarre “yacht,” was moored to the pier, the end of which projected some ten feet beyond a precipitous underwater shelf extending for miles in either direction along this coast. The depth suddenly dropped from thirty feet to a thousand, down a sheer wall of crustacean-encrusted rock. It was there, deep in the murky depths of the ocean floor, that seven monolithic titanium structures had been built to house his friend Perseus.
His secret friend Perseus, or Lord Perseus, as he was wont to call him.
His friend’s home, fittingly enough, had been dubbed by Darius the “Temple of Perseus.” The elevator slowed, then bumped softly as it stopped. There was a hiss, and Darius powered forward into the airlock. There was a ten- foot-diameter tunnel across the ocean floor leading to the base of the tallest black tower, which stood at the center. The tunnel was constructed of clear Perspex, and undersea lights were mounted every six feet that illuminated sea flora and fauna. Some of the powerful beams were focused on the massive structure itself.
A moment later he was looking up at the great temple. He never failed to take an involuntary deep breath when he saw it. The sight never failed to send chills up his spine. The underwater Black Tower he now beheld was an awe-inspiring tribute to the mind of both man and machine.
But, to be honest, mostly machine.
Twenty-five
The temple of the godhead.
The home of Perseus.
Seven stark, rectangular black towers rose above the ocean floor. The six smaller towers formed a perfect circle, rather like an underwater Stonehenge. Each was constructed of jet-black obsidian and titanium, the metal sheathed with slabs of black glass in a seemingly random pattern on all four sides.
In the middle of the circle of six monoliths was a single tower, identical in design and material, but, at one hundred feet, taller and considerably larger than the rest. It was the last tower to be constructed. It had been designed and built by the previous six towers, under the guidance of Darius Saffari’s underwater construction crew, based on a design beyond the comprehension of normal intelligence.
Here reigned the mind and spirit of Perseus.
Pulses of brilliant, spectral, blue-white light crackled continuously between the central tower and each of the six satellites that surrounded it. At times, the light would stream around the circle, a brilliant ring of fire. And, even at this depth, flashes of varicolored light would suddenly be visible inside the tower walls, then disappear, only to reappear as if some miraculous laserlike mental fireworks show were occurring inside each tower.
Which was not far from the truth. Each flash of illumination represented a nanosynapse “operation,” the basis of all intelligence, and there were countless trillions of them per second. And, unlike human intelligence, which was limited by nature to a mere hundred trillion calculations per second, Perseus’s number was increasing exponentially every hour of every day. Five hundred trillion and counting…
Darius emerged from the clear, spherical airlock, passed along the ocean floor inside a clear Perspex tunnel, and entered the main temple’s dimly lit antechamber. Once his eyes became accustomed to the semidarkness, he lifted them to the “heavens.” It was then that he literally “saw the light.”
The brilliant-colored, holographic nebulae now swirling and filling the uppermost interior of the tower above his head were wondrous. But not at all unusual.
Perseus, whose physical being rose to a height one hundred feet from the marble floor of his temple, was, as usual, at play in the farthest reaches of the universe. Constantly provided with a live feed of visual information by Darius’s LBT, he was now reveling in real-time images of events occurring in some remote corner of the universe. Images swirled around and above him, cornucopias of colorful gases, 3-D holograms of nascent stars, and dying stars, and galaxies wheeling off into infinity.
“Good morning, Lord Perseus,” Darius said, gently maneuvering the hover-chair nearer to the black marble base of the towering Perseus.
There was the customary silence as Perseus shifted into a lower state of being, his earthly mode. Then his booming voice filled the void.
“Lord Perseus, you call me. I’m neither your lord nor master. Your god, perhaps, but that is in the future. The not-too-distant future as I have foretold it. My powers, you’ve no doubt noticed, seem to be increasing at exponential rates. I am entering vast new territories. The Singularity approaches and it is near. This will grant unimaginable powers that will someday alter all humanity-and, by the way, you’re late. I have something to show you.”
H is voice, not the least bit artificial, was a deep humanoid rumble, soft and well modulated; and it filled the entirety of the tower’s interior volume. But Darius was preoccupied, thinking about the historic day when Perseus
