The God Machine Read online

  Smythe spoke to Rathman. "Come around wide, Deke, just south of the restricted area. Clearance okay?"

  Rathman nodded. He motioned to a light blinking green on the instrument panel. "They've got us,"

  he said.

  "Good," Smythe replied, turning back to me. "See that area, Steve? Fort Carson; Army camp." An airfield appeared off the right wing. "That's Butts, an Army field. Farther south—see it? —is Bear Creek strip. It lies within the restricted area of Fort Carson. Extends to the west thirty miles or so."

  Smythe pointed ahead of us. "Over there—see those buildings?" A community perched along the steep slope of a mountain expanded swiftly. "Take a good look," Smythe said with a quick smile. "Name of the place is Bear Creek. From now on, that's home."

  I stared at him. "Bear Creek?"

  He laughed, nodding. I looked down again, and things I hadn't seen before became evident to me.

  Now that I looked carefully, that is. Bear Creek—what a name!—was considerably larger than my casual first glance had indicated. Many of the buildings were larger than I expected for a town stuck precariously on the flank of a mountain. And then I noticed the single wide, well-paved road that led through a narrow gorge, along precipitous cliff walls. And the large, mysterious paved ovals both within the town and along its entrances.

  "What are those?" I asked. "Those wide areas, I mean. From the looks of them they're large enough to be helicopter pads."

  "Right the first time," Smythe replied.

  I looked at him in surprise. "Helicopter pads? Out here in the middle of nowhere?"

  Smythe gestured as Rathman brought us around in a steep, clawing turn, uncomfortably close to the mountain slopes. "That's not the middle of nowhere, Steve," Smythe said. "That's an iceberg community."

  I blinked my eyes, and he laughed. "Most of it isn't visible," he added.

  More pieces began to fit. "And Project 79—"

  He glanced down. "You can't see it," he said. "It's inside that mountain."

  Inside that mountain . . . Suddenly I couldn't wait to get on the ground.

  A town I never knew existed. Bear Creek, incongruous in name, startling in appearance. Eight years ago it didn't exist. It had been hammered not only against the flanks of the mountain, ten miles due south of Pikes Peak, but well into the solid rock itself. A town with beautiful homes and modern shopping centers, with a gleaming new hospital, theaters, excellent restaurants, recreational facilities. And helicopter landing pads. I mustn't forget those. Or the false building entrances that extended into huge tunnels that bored deeply within the mountain and then angled off to ... well, to where Project 79 was set up. I hadn't yet seen the complex, although by now curiosity was gnawing uncomfortably at what little patience I retained.

  "But wherever did you get the name Bear Creek?" I protested, looking at the tree-lined streets and imposing buildings as Smythe drove us through the town. "That's rather odd for a place like this, isn't it?"

  Smythe shook his head, enjoying himself. "Not at all. People do get mail here, and they refer to the town—you can't blot out human nature, Steve. The countryside around here is filled with communities with similar names."

  "Such as?" I demanded.

  "Cotopaxi, Texas Creek, Silver Cliff, Black Forest, Cripple Creek, Buffalo Creek, Shawnee, Shaffers Crossing—"

  "Enough, enough," I broke in. "So we're saturated with the Old West. Okay. Now, when do we stop playing games and get down to business? I want to see the Project, for Christ's sake!"

  He chuckled. "You'll have to be patient for at least another day. First thing tomorrow morning we'll run you through security, and—"

  "Security!" I shouted.

  He raised one thick eyebrow. "Why should that surprise you so much?" he said. "If I recall, we already went around and around on that point."

  "Sure we did," I said, still angry. "But you've had more than enough time to run your checks and—"

  "Back up," he interrupted, waving his hand at me. "This hasn't anything to do with a security check, Steve."

  I waited.

  "It's to provide you with the security—ah, well, call them credentials," he continued. "The credentials that will let you get into the Project. It's an automatic system and it's operated wholly by the computer. Untouched by human hands, and that sort of thing. You must be processed for it. We'll take you to the hospital first thing in the morning."

  "Hospital? What are you talking about, Tom?"

  He turned into the driveway leading through a modern apartment complex. "You'll see in the morning," he said, ending further conversation on the subject.

  I glared at him and leaned back in the seat. I gestured at the buildings about us. "What's this place?"

  Smythe eased into a parking stall and cut the engine. "Why," he said with mock surprise, "this is where you live."

  As the crow flies, Colorado Springs, with its famed Broadmoor Hotel, lay exactly fifteen miles from the community with the incongruous name of Bear Creek. But you couldn't drive there as the crow flew—you had to drive south along a road that wasn't even on the map, and pick up the secondary highway that circled around the base of the mountain before starting to the north, a trip of about twenty-five miles. I found I didn't mind the circuitous route, after all. Not in this country, anyway. No matter where you went you were surrounded with majestic, eye-stopping scenery.

  Denver lay 150 miles almost due north of Colorado Springs, a beautiful drive along Highway 87, which eased past the Air Force Academy, and wound through ranches and resort areas. Tom indicated that every now and then I would travel to Denver, where the University carried on advanced research programs in cybernetics. I was to learn that the presence of that research activity was more important than the work they did; it had been established, Tom explained, to justify, publicly, at least, the presence in the area of so many scientists.

  In fact, more than the physical availability of a mountain into which engineers had blasted to create the working center for Project 79 dictated the selection of this particular area. Fort Carson, with advanced military electronics research its predominant activity, although it maintained a training center for Army mountain and ski troops, also justified the presence of scientists, technicians, and specialists, and was a perfect routing point for the traffic that moved into and from Project 79. There was also the Air Force Academy to the north, with all its advanced electronic and computer facilities. Above all else, however, there did exist—and in full public knowledge—one of the greatest computer-operations centers in the world, close to Manitou Springs.

  Deep within Cheyenne Mountain, balanced on massive springs cushioning multistory steel structures, was NORAD —a complex facility, invisible to the eye, that contained the headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command. NORAD was also the electronic nerve center for all space tracking and surveillance systems maintained by the United States throughout the world. Its great tunnels were guarded with complex, foot-thick steel doors that could snap closed by command or when they were triggered by radioactive detectors or blast sensors. NORAD, linked electronically to tracking and surveillance sites, to other command centers (including the White House), to always-airborne emergency control centers, to robot satellites, was one of the miracles of modern technology.

  When they had carved the NORAD headquarters out of the granite of Cheyenne Mountain, without making any secret of the massive operation, they were able to cloak effectively a parallel effort that, well to the south, would become the secret facility within another mountain for Project 79.

  I began to find a grudging admiration for the security-conscious mind. Things did fit beautifully.

  Because NORAD was essentially a computer operation—without the capability of digital computers it could never have functioned as had been intended. And that meant cybernetics technicians by the hundreds, all of whom proved a perfect smokescreen for what went on near a modern community with the Old West name of Bear Creek.

  They did
everything but hang me on a meat-hook to dry out under infrared lamps. When Tom Smythe told me I would go through a medical security processing, he meant what he said. Medical processing for security controls within Project 79 included exhaustive medical examination and then the recording of essential elements of the body and the physical makeup that are virtually impossible to duplicate in another individual.

  They took my fingerprints and charted every scar on my body and made an X-ray record of everything I had ever broken. They recorded my retinal patterns, since these differ in each human being as much as fingerprints vary from one person to another. They measured my body mass, and despite the passage of years to come and the inevitable alterations in physiological signature, a computer would be able to examine me in like manner and extrapolate certain conditions to which my body would adhere almost religiously—if restrictive blind development can be so typed, which I was assured it could be.

  They recorded my voice and broke it down into a dozen identifiable characteristics. They made records of my calcium content, breakdown of elements in the blood, and other things I don't even want to remember.

  The headshrinkers recorded my brain activity, established a meticulously sensitive record of alpha-wave patterns, measured electrical generation, and wrapped me up into a neat package of identifiable sensitivity. At any time in the future these "signature characteristics" could be rechecked—erasing all doubt as to the identification of any individual no matter what ID cards he carried or who he claimed to be. This was a medical screening to end all screenings—and they convinced me that no degree of skill or artfulness could ever deceive this battery of physiological watchdogs.

  I hated to admit it, even to myself.

  I was impressed.

  The next morning, admitted by the complex security system, I walked into the most colossal cybernetics complex that existed anywhere in the world.

  I felt about as big as my thumb.

  Project 79, unknown to the outside world, had been under way for more than ten years. Its systems were twenty years in the future. And all this time they had been preparing, had been striving to reach a point where they might be able to bring a quiescent electronic giant to life.

  They were almost ready.

  9

  they called me the Baby-Sitter.

  Officially I held the position of Chief Programmer. I felt a sense of guilt about the title, as if I were laying false claim to the labors of others. Thousands of skilled cybernetics specialists had spent years of intensive programming so that my particular talents could be endowed with meaning.

  It would be my task to establish communication between human subjects and the bio-cybernetics complex we called Project 79.

  Between a brain created by God and that shaped by man.

  We weren't yet ready for the true bio-cybernetics program. That remained in its experimental stages. At the moment we communicated with 79, the computer "brain," through standard programming.

  This met the requirements for the continuous data input for 79's memory cells, while enabling us to determine the guidelines for more advanced efforts.

  As the day-to-day working parameters of 79 emerged from the input and testing activities, we prepared for the first stages of direct bionics communication. It was the sort of effort where, to reach the heart of the onion, first you peel away—gingerly—one thin layer after another. Not a scientist among us could claim honestly to comprehend the fine thread that might run between the miracle that is the human brain . . . and a multibillion-dollar computer complex that could, through a single error, become the first multibillion dollar paranoid.

  I tried not only carefully, but almost with desperation, to be certain I understood fully every move we made, every step we took. I knew that the slightest error on my part could introduce potentially disastrous consequences. It was essential that I know every aspect, every element of what we were doing. Before I could integrate myself as a reliable facet of the program, I had first to understand the sheer physical structure and organization within which Project 79 came to be, and the more I learned of the vast cybernetics effort, the more meaningful became Tom Smythe's tirade that great scientific accomplishments inevitably are handmaidens to political decisions and engineering realities.

  When the demolition crews ended their task of creating great cathedral-like spaces linked through tunnels to the outside world, the true work on Project 79 had only begun. Fortunately, there was the experience within Cheyenne Mountain from which engineers could draw, and Project 79 went ahead with minimum difficulty. As quickly as the initial team departed, new groups swarmed in to set up the physical structure that would house the cybernetics complex. A vast base construction —structural components, power and communications lines, living and working quarters, all the prosaic elements from which great projects are drawn—preceded the technicians and the scientists.

  The complex that constituted Project 79, every structure, entire buildings in themselves, balanced upon huge coil springs. In the event—not as unlikely as computerized programs would lead us to believe—that a nuclear war rattled the nation, the springs would ease the shock of a nuclear blast even against the exterior of the mountain containing the cybernetics complex. Those facilities of especial sensitivity—the memory cells, internal communications lines, nuclear-power systems, the electronic sinew of the Project—all these received added protection through massive hydraulic pistons, shock absorbers to dampen the effects of spring rebound.

  Because the investment in Project 79 represented not only dollars, but time, brainpower, and a critical slice of the future, every precaution possible became ingrained within its final shape. In effect the cybernetics complex was established on the basis that it must withstand the effects of violent natural and/or man-induced cataclysms. The coil-spring foundations and hydraulic pistons were only one element of that "design for disaster" philosophy. Each structure of the complex was sheathed within a great cubicle of steel plate, and then the steel plate, down to the smallest pinhole or weld seam, was itself sealed. We were, in essence, an electronic entity. A nuclear blast produces among its effects an

  "electromagnetic pulse," an electrical shock wave of enormous energy yield. Were that electromagnetic pulse to sweep within the complex that made up Project 79, then in less time than requires telling, we could suffer irreparable damage. For this same reason, grounding cables linked together every building and facility. Additional protection was effected by copper-edging every door and passageway. In the critical areas massive steel blast doors in pairs prevented the entry of unauthorized personnel.

  Electronic and mechanical sensors throughout the complex, and along the surface of the mountain itself, sniffed out sudden changes in air pressure, temperature, and the presence of radioactivity. With an excess sensed in any of these areas, the complex proper was sealed automatically against even a stray speck of dust. Engineers utilized every protective device of the NORAD complex; both areas, for example, received their water supply from Colorado Springs. Water input, as well as air, received constant filtering, purification, and monitoring for content.

  The heart of the cybernetics complex—the "brain"—comprised a physical space no larger than that of a small apartment. Most people envisioned a great computer system as being the size of an entire apartment building. But there's no reason to suffer such unwieldy size. Bulkiness, complexity, and excessive components destroy effectiveness. In the old days of vacuum tubes, that was unavoidable.

  With solid-state components, microsubminaturization, and closed force fields, microsize was the direction in which we moved. The core of 79 was thus far smaller physically than one might expect. But there were more elements within it than in an old vacuum-tube computer large enough to fill the entire Pentagon.

  Of Project 79 a saying was born: If you can see it, it's too big.

  After all, nature manages to pack more than ten billion neurons, sensors, and all the associated blood-flow systems and supporting mechanisms o
f the human brain into a unit of only eighty cubic inches.

  Large size becomes wasteful and self-defeating.

  The dinosaur is long gone, but the cockroach is still around.

  The entire entity of Project 79 occupied a cubic volume equal to that of a twenty-story building.

  This was distributed outward from the spherical core along tunnels to distant chambers and the facilities that made up the ancillary systems of the complex.

  The computer proper—the brain—occupied what is best described as a spherical entity.

  Extending outward in all directions were multilayered shells of the sphere, like a small ball surrounded by ever larger and thicker spherical shells around the core. This provided, to the entire system, the element of maximum possible compactness consistent with separation of different elements.

  Directly beneath the cybernetics core, surrounded by massive steel-reinforced concrete with sandwiched layers of thick lead, was the most advanced power source yet developed. The nuclear power system of twin breeder reactors, with its integral supply of raw uranium processed into feeder rods and control elements, was sealed within elaborate security controls. No man could enter the reactor area without the permission, specifically, of the computer itself.

  That shook me when I first ran into it. The more I thought of the system, the more unreasonable became the idea. There's such a thing as carrying security too far.

  From the beginning of Project 79 every effort was made to establish the computer as self-supporting within the limitations of restrictive mobility and artificial intelligence. The degree of that intelligence didn't concern its designers, since there was specified a designated area of self-responsibility and maintenance. In effect the intention was to assure that the system knew how to button its own pants.

  The concept for self-functioning for 79 pursued, not abstract thought, but logical and meaningful reactions to problems and, subsequently, logical actions to accomplish their solution. In this respect we implemented the intellectual decision with the capacity of limited physical response.