Страница 95 из 97
"No more," she said. "No more!"
General Bauer's waxlike expression didn't change. Nothing that his daughter or the computer said was going to get through. He moved farther to his left, toward the MRI unit, angling for a kill shot.
"Will you kill me to do this?" Geli asked.
I looked back at the shattered Plexiglas shield, willing Rachel to act. She was staring hypnotized at the deadly dance between Geli and her father.
"I won't kill you," General Bauer said. Then he lashed out with the heavy pistol, knocking Geli aside as easily as he would a child.
As she fell, the general swung the barrel of his gun toward me, but in that moment the Super-MRI screeched and he was knocked off his feet as though by a howitzer shell. His pistol slammed into the MRI sca
Rachel knelt over me, probing my shoulder with a finger.
"Help me up," I grunted.
"Stay down."
"Please… get me up."
I struggled to my knees. Rachel got under my good shoulder and helped me to my feet.
Geli was sitting beside her father, looking down in disbelief. The general's neck was covered in bright red blood, and his eyes were glazed open. He'd been stand¬ing between the gun and the MRI sca
"John Skow is still trying to shut down the com¬puter," Geli said in monotone. "I don't think he can do it with both of you alive."
"I am safe," said Trinity. "And I am sorry for you, Geli."
Rachel and I walked slowly around the magnetic shield. The black sphere waited, its blue lasers pulsing like a heartbeat within the web of carbon. On the screen beneath it, I saw an image of myself and Rachel looking into Trinity's camera.
"Do you know us?" I asked.
"Yes," said the childlike voice. "Better than you know yourselves."
EPILOGUE
Today, within Trinity's carbon-fiber circuitry and crystal memory, Rachel and I remain one entity. But we were only a jumping-off point, parents of a child who has already far outstripped its origins.
Peter Godin dreamed of liberating the mind from the body. He believed that liberation was possible because he believed the mind is merely the sum of the neural con¬nections in our brains. Andrew Fielding believed some¬thing different: that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I'm still not sure who is right.
That Trinity could be built at all seems to vindicate Godin. But sometimes at night, lying on the ledge of sleep, I feel another presence in my mind. An echo of that divinely unbounded perspective of which I caught only the barest glimpse during my coma. I suspect that this echo is Trinity. That, as Fielding predicted, the Trinity-computer and I are forever entangled at that unstable border between the world we see around us and the sub¬atomic world that gives substance to the visible. Rachel doesn't like to talk about this, but she has felt it, too.
As Peter Godin predicted, the "new" Trinity computer has not allowed itself to be disco
The Trinity computer is not God and does not claim to be. Human beings, however, are not so quick to dismiss this possibility. To date, 4,183 websites devoted to Trinity have sprung up around the world. Some are run by New Age dis¬ciples who tout the divinity of the machine, others by fundamentalists who list "proofs" that Trinity is the Antichrist predicted in the Book of Revelation. Still other sites are purely technical: they track Trinity's movements through the computer networks of the world, mapping the activities of the first metahuman intelligence on the planet. Trinity itself has visited most of these sites, but has left no word of its opinions on them.
One of Trinity's chief worries is the inevitable day when another MRI-based computer goes on-line some¬where in the world. To prevent this from happening, Trin¬ity monitors all worldwide signal traffic. But as with nuclear weapons proliferation, compliance ca
The prospect of multiple Trinity computers in con¬flict is terrifying. It is not known whether the computers rumored to be in development are based on male, female, or merged neuromodels. Could single human minds given such power evolve sufficiently past their vestigial instincts to coexist in the limited sphere of the world? I'm not optimistic. But perhaps they will not perceive the world as limited. The resource of knowl¬edge is theoretically infinite. Perhaps Trinity can, in fact, make an end to war.
I leave such concerns to others now.
When people ask if my dreams-or hallucinations- were real, I answer this way: I'm not certain, but I find clues in different places. One of the best I received from the most unexpected source imaginable.
During the past three months-while I wrote this nar¬rative of my Trinity experiences-the Trinity computer directed construction of a second Trinity prototype for research purposes. It now stands next to its predecessor in the Containment building at White Sands, isolated from the outside world but functioning perfectly as an independent entity.
When I learned of the development of this machine, I wrote an e-mail to the Trinity computer. In that letter, I made a strong case that no one deserved to experience the Trinity state more than Andrew Fielding, the man who had made it possible.
Trinity was way ahead of me.
Last week, I walked through a ring of armed men and into the Containment building, where I found two car¬bon spheres standing side by side. I'd both dreaded and looked forward to this day. Dreaded it because the Andrew Fielding I was going to meet had no memory more recent than the day he was first sca
I was right. Fielding reminded me that he would have periodic digital life within the Trinity computer, and he even speculated that someday-probably a century-down the road-the reverse process of Trinity might be perfected: a stored digital neuromodel might be down¬loaded into a biological brain, or wetware.
But what truly salvaged Fielding's sanity was learning that he had brought the love of his life out of China and married her. His neuromodel remembered only pining in vain for Lu Li, whom it still believed was trapped in Beijing. I told the story of Lu Li's escape from Geli Bauer's surveillance teams, which, while not so dramatic as mine, was more successful. A few hours after I'd left her house that night, Lu Li had slipped outside with her bichon frise and made her way across Chapel Hill on foot. There she joined a Chinese family that owned a restaurant where she and Fielding had frequently dined. That family hid her in their home until the events sur¬rounding Trinity were resolved.