Seeker, p.1
Seeker, page 1
SEEKER
Douglas E. Richards
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Douglas E. Richards
Published by Paragon Press, 2018
Email the author at douglaserichards1@gmail.com
Friend him on Facebook at Douglas E. Richards Author
Visit the author’s website at www.douglaserichards.com
All rights reserved. With the exception of excerpts for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system.
First Edition
PROLOGUE
The clear, reflective spacecraft was the size of a softball while at rest. But since it was now very near light speed, its mass had grown and its length had diminished in dramatic fashion, as relativity demanded. It had raced through both the intergalactic and interstellar voids for more than two million years, but its tremendous speed caused time dilation effects, and as far as it was concerned the journey hadn’t even been a hundredth this long.
A photon of light, of course, could do this trick far better, as it moved at a speed that caused time to stop dead in its tracks. The photon could be born on a star and travel for a billion years, at least as measured by an outside observer, before slamming into a distant telescope—not having aged a second. To the photon, this journey would be instantaneous. It would leave its star and die on the telescope a billion light years distant, with no time passing for it at all.
Interstellar space was cold beyond imagining, but the tiny probe was able to tap into the froth of the void, the particles and energy that appeared and disappeared at random, the ultimate quantum magic trick. Perhaps this was the Universe’s way of providing the perfect energy source for those who could learn how to tap it.
Or maybe, instead, this energy froth was a gift from an all-powerful deity, yet another subtle clue as to its existence.
If only the Universe, or this deity, hadn’t set such a limiting, and unbreakable, speed limit.
The probe possessed sensors of unbelievable power, and had recently detected radio signals, which it had quickly traced back to their planet of origin. The nature of these signals made several things clear all at once: Not only was there life on this particular planet, but it was intelligent life. And not only intelligent life, but life that had reached a basic level of technological sophistication.
Outstanding.
The probe, as satisfied as a probe could be, instantly made a course correction, now having accomplished at least the first stage of its mission parameters.
The interstellar softball continued to digest the ever-growing content being broadcast from this chatty planet as it hurtled through space, and with each passing second it moved almost a hundred eighty thousand miles closer to its target.
The planet, which the inhabitants called Earth, Terra, and dozens of other names in different language systems, was now just under three light years away.
Only three years until the probe arrived.
But much sooner as far as it was concerned.
It could hardly wait.
PART 1
“To appreciate the nature and significance of the coming ‘singularity,’ it is important to ponder the nature of exponential growth. Toward this end, I am fond of telling the tale of the inventor of chess and his patron, the emperor of China. In response to the emperor’s offer of a reward for his new beloved game, the inventor asked for a single grain of rice on the first square, two on the second square, four on the third, and so on. The emperor quickly granted this seemingly benign and humble request.
“One version of the story has the emperor going bankrupt as the sixty-three doublings ultimately totaled eighteen million trillion grains of rice, which would require rice fields covering twice the surface area of the Earth, oceans included.
“Another version of the story has the inventor losing his head.”
—Ray Kurzweil, The Law of Accelerating Returns
1
Anwar Sadiq whispered a silent prayer to Allah, clutched the American-made M4 assault rifle strapped around his neck, and glanced at his watch. He estimated that showtime was now only ten to fifteen minutes away. His eyes gleamed in the darkness, twin beacons framed by the folded black scarf that covered his head and face, their intensity and shine indicating intelligence and zealotry in equal measure—a lethal combination.
Sadiq was one of the few leaders of ISIS to have survived the organization’s decimation, during which time his brave and glorious brethren had been expunged from the many territories they had acquired through their early, spectacular rise, when they had spread like a brushfire across the Middle East.
In ISIS’s heyday the lure of their grand cause, the caliphate—the purification of the Muslim faith and the setting of the world once again on a righteous course—was irresistible to many young men in Iraq, Syria, the Levant, and Europe, who had rushed in to be a part of the excitement. And ISIS leaders had instinctively known the best way to attract them, tapping into the same primal recipe that had worked countless times before.
Religion was the centerpiece of their movement, of course, but this wasn’t what had lured in so many followers willing to kill and die in ISIS’s name. Not really. The central cause could have been anything. Workers’ rights. Racial purity. Revenge.
Humanity was fiercely tribal. And young men, in particular, were wired to seek out adventure, glory, and esteem. ISIS was cool. ISIS was a brotherhood fighting together for a glorious cause. Killing together, raping unbelievers together. What could cement fraternal bonds more completely than this?
And in addition to offering adventure, glory, and camaraderie, ISIS offered something even more important: purpose.
But while all of this was true, ISIS and Anwar Sadiq knew that the disaffected young men they sought to attract also needed to believe they were joining a winning team. To believe that their self-sacrifice would eventually achieve their goals and save the world. The more recruits and territory ISIS gathered, the easier it was to gain additional recruits and territory.
Nothing succeeded like success.
Which is why Sadiq’s current operation was the most critical the organization had ever undertaken. Because the tide had turned against them many years earlier, when the US had finally begun to take them seriously, and what they had been so sure was an unsinkable ship was pierced by an iceberg. The Great Satan began to crush them, to cast doubt on their inevitability, and with this, the hopes and dreams of scores of young men who would otherwise have flocked to replenish their ranks.
The once swelling, pounding, lion heart of ISIS was grinding to a halt, and this mission represented a last-gasp effort to shock it back to life. It was time to give the US a black eye they would never forget. One that would inspire young men around the world to take up the fight once again.
Sadiq surveyed ten of the fourteen soldiers he had with him on this night, the ten who were within sight. Each was covered head to toe in black, as was he, and each fondled an assault weapon of his own. The four not present were carrying out important duties. Two were ready to block the long, winding entrance to the property on his order, while two others were manning two parked and hidden cars towing industrial-grade woodchippers behind them.
The plan was visionary and bold. Daring and audacious. Sadiq had been given the honor to lead ISIS’s smartest, most capable men on its most important mission.
He stood in the still darkness, the calm before the storm, going through the mission in his mind one last time. Send a viral AI into the electronic security system to take control of it. Establish a roadblock to eliminate all chances that a newcomer might surprise them once the Op had begun. And finally, kill cell phone coverage in the area.
They would have to commence the attack within minutes of this last, as blocking cell phone communications would draw immediate attention. By rights, their targets shouldn’t be using their phones on this night, but Sadiq knew that many would anyway.
In the West, the phone had become a drug even more addictive than opioids. In a culture becoming ever more secular, the phone had become a god.
But in the midst of the coming massacre, Sadiq had the feeling his targets were about to rediscover their true religion, just moments before he and his men ushered them all into oblivion.
2
Ben Kagan waited for his gray Hydro sedan to enter a vast limestone surface on the grounds of a mansion in Poway, California, and park itself. He took a deep breath and braced himself for the party to come. This was the last place he wanted to be.
He had never been the party type. He considered himself to be very much on the boring side. Even his car was boring. It was a Hydro, of course, since Norman Weiser had founded this particular company, among many others, and Kagan was one of Weiser’s most valued scientists. But it was one of Hydro’s most unexciting models, a mid-range four-door sedan.
Like Kagan, it was a brilliant performer. And fully autonomous, of course. But not too flashy. Dependable, but not racy.
Still, it was a luxury car by any measure, and the woman in the passenger seat beside him, looking breathtaking in her elegant blue dress, was stunning, an adjective that applied to her personality even more than it did to her firm, gym-toned body and incandescent smile.
It was hard for Kagan to complain. He was only twenty-nine, and his life was very full.
Maybe too full.
He hadn’t watched a television show in years, or read any fiction. The closest he had come to a vacation was when he occasionally allowed himself to take an entire Saturday or Sunday off, instead of working for at least several hours. He had been the top player on Princeton’s tennis team as an undergraduate, yet he was down to playing tennis once a month, and exercising twice a week on a treadmill in front of an expansive computer monitor so that he wouldn’t lose even a moment of productivity.
Something had to give. Now that Cynthia Shearer, the remarkable woman beside him, had entered his life, the job he treasured and the woman he loved were competing for his attention. Even after jettisoning everything else in his life, there still weren’t enough hours in the day to satisfy both.
It had been so much simpler before Cynthia had come on the scene. Simpler, but certainly not better.
He had been just a year away from completing his doctorate in physics and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University when he seized an opportunity to join one of Norman Weiser’s first companies, Advanced Propulsion Technologies. Even though he had been forced to pull out of school just short of his doctoral finish line, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Weiser was a wunderkind, a man who had burst onto the scene from nowhere, and in just a few short years had managed to out-musk the great Elon Musk. His initial breakthrough had come when he had devised an ingenious method for creating stable metallic hydrogen, a material that had been pursued for decades for its theorized properties as both an ideal superconductor and a powerful rocket propellant.
The applications for stable metallic hydrogen and the room temperature superconductivity it made possible were as wide-ranging as they were breathtaking. A superconductor was able to conduct electric current with no resistance, making batteries more powerful and electromagnets so strong they could levitate heavy objects, basically defying gravity.
The first commercially operated high-speed magnetic levitating train, or Maglev, was built in Shanghai in 2004. This railway used superconducting magnets ten times more powerful than ordinary electromagnets to levitate and propel the train. But there was a catch—these magnets had to be cooled to hundreds of degrees below zero to achieve superconductivity, a difficult and pricey requirement.
Room temperature superconductivity had long been a Holy Grail, and Norman Weiser, brilliant, daring, and iconoclastic, had finally brought it home.
Production of high purity metallic hydrogen was still tricky, and the technology was still being perfected, but Weiser had sprouted more companies even than Musk, in a shorter time, with several of these in direct competition with the great innovator, including in rocketry, high-speed tunneling, and electric cars.
And soon Weiser’s electric cars would become Maglev cars, which would be charged and propelled using low-cost superconducting electromagnets in his cars and in the streets. At this rate, Weiser was sure to obsolete Tesla and SpaceX, and all other car and rocket companies on the planet, for that matter, within the decade.
The world order, at least when it came to technology, had been relatively stable for thousands of years. But in modern times, industries were being birthed and obsoleted at a furious pace. Even technology that had seemed utterly woven into the very fabric of society was often relegated to the trash heap of history in the blink of an eye.
In 1996, Eastman Kodak was a hundred-year-old powerhouse with one hundred forty thousand employees and a valuation of twenty-eight billion dollars. Yet a mere sixteen years later, the company was filing for bankruptcy, a T. Rex dinosaur that had failed to fathom the disruptive power and game-changing impact of the digital photography revolution.
In contrast to this, while Kodak was on its last legs, a small handful of entrepreneurs founded Instagram, a photo-sharing service, which rapidly attracted as many as eight hundred million users. Eighteen months after its founding, the same year that Kodak filed for bankruptcy, these few Instagram founders sold their company for a billion dollars.
And Norman Weiser was about to unleash this sort of disruptive technological change on any number of industries, with him as Instagram and the rest of the world as Kodak.
Ben Kagan loved what he did with a passion, and would have paid Weiser for the privilege of working for him. Instead, he was paid handsomely to solve fun, challenging, and consequential problems. Since much of this compensation took the form of stock options, which were now worth well over a hundred million dollars and climbing rapidly, the word rewarding didn’t go nearly far enough.
Then, fourteen months earlier, out of the blue, Kagan’s life had become much more . . . complicated. Weiser had hired Cynthia Shearer as a consultant on one of the projects Kagan was heading, and he had become instantly and irresistibly enamored with her.
Since she had worked with him side by side, in the trenches, for six months, he had gotten to know her far better than if he had dated her for many years, and had used every last minute of his spare time to see her.
By the time her tour of duty was up, they had fallen in love. Kagan would have proposed marriage to her already if he thought there was any chance that she’d accept.
But he knew she wouldn’t. Not until he could achieve a better balance between his first love and his second, and somehow find a way to spend more time with her now that they weren’t working together. He was determined to do just that, no matter what it took. He would prove to her that she was his top priority, and get her to agree to spend the rest of her life with him.
Which is why he was with her now, despite not enjoying this kind of party, which he found empty, boring, and a complete waste of time.
But while parties weren’t his thing, he understood why Cynthia wanted to be here. This residence, and party, belonged to Dan Vettori, the founder and CEO of a young company working on improving virtual reality technology. Cynthia had consulted for Vettori almost as long as she had for Weiser, and had always had good things to say about the man. Besides, this was a great networking opportunity for her.
As the car parked and shut itself off, Kagan leaned over and planted a brief kiss on Cynthia’s soft lips. “Here we go,” he said tentatively.
“It’s a party, not a funeral.”
He shrugged. “Either way, as long as I’m with you, it can’t be all bad.”
“You’re going to have more fun than you think.”
Kagan rolled his eyes. “That would almost have to be true.”
She laughed. “You’ll enjoy this. Really. Dan is very smart. He runs in different circles than you do, but his friends tend to be impressive. Trust me, conversation won’t be limited to the weather and sports. Might even be what you’d call scintillating.”
“Scintillating?” said Kagan, raising his eyebrows. He had never used this word in his life. He grinned. “Have you been reading my diary again?”
Cynthia laughed as they exited the car.
The party was already in full swing, and there were many dozens of cars lined up on the never-ending limestone pavers in addition to his own. Dan Vettori’s residence was at the end of a long marble path that led from the parking area, and it loomed against landscape lighting in the distance, looking like a museum.
Cynthia checked the time on her phone. “We’d better get up there,” she said. “I met Dan’s wife, Kelly, when I was here for a meeting last year, but I really want to meet his kids. He couldn’t stop raving about them when I was part of his team.”
Kagan was confused. “Dan Vettori has adult children?” he said. “I thought he was still fairly young.”
“He is. So are they. Amber is seven and Eric is nine. But they’re both precocious. He told me he’s letting them hang out at the party until ten, before he sends them off to bed. Most kids would probably want to avoid an adult party, but apparently they pleaded for more time.”
