He strained for some indication of the number who approached, if they were enemy reinforcements or aid sent by Gray. Then he heard someone with a French accent say faintly, Down that way. Careful of the bones.
Monk shifted to a pillar closer to the doorway, passing through the trickle of dust from the crack overhead. Some got up his nose. He painfully stifled a sneeze.
Then another voice, a female with a Spanish lilt: How much farther? We don’t have much time.
Someone scolded her. Hush. Quit talking so much. We don’t know who might . . .
Either the acoustics shifted and muffled the last words, or the speaker lowered his voice. Still, Monk recognized who had urged such caution.
It was Kat’s right arm.
Monk cupped his mouth. “Jason! Over here!”
The kid answered, “Monk?”
“No, his ghost. Come over here so I can haunt your ass.”
A short time later, a loud crunching and hollow knocking of bones announced the arrival of a small party. The group hurried into the room, led by Simon Barbier, followed quickly by Mara, Carly, and Jason.
Monk kept his weapon in hand in case their commotion drew unwanted attention or if they had been followed. “What are you all doing down here?”
Jason rushed forward and filled him in on the details, about the threat to a neighboring nuclear plant, about an impending meltdown orchestrated by Mara’s AI.
Monk drew the group toward the array of computer gear. He pointed to the laptop. “As in that AI?”
Mara recognized her own handiwork and swept over to inspect everything. “My Xénese device. You recovered it.” She leaned toward the screen. “And Eve.”
“Where’s Gray now?” Jason asked. “And Kowalski?”
As Mara performed some arcane diagnostics, Monk told him everything that had transpired. “I’ve not heard anything more from Gray. But—” He nodded to the crack as it ominously groaned. “—we’d better get all this gear dissembled and hauled somewhere safe.”
“No,” Mara said, her fingers still tapping at the keyboard. “We’ve got power and direct wireline access to the network infrastructure. We can’t leave.”
Simon had been examining the connections to the huge cables running through the room. “She’s right. These trunks were all installed by Orange. From here, Eve should be able to get anywhere.”
Monk didn’t understand. “Why does that matter?”
Carly answered, dropping to a knee and opening a titanium case she had hauled in with her. “We’re going to convince Eve to help us. To go back out and fix the damage, and hopefully return control to the nuclear plant.”
“Before it’s too late,” Mara added.
“But what’s to stop the Crucible from using their Xénese device to attack the plant again?”
Mara opened her mouth, then turned sharply. “What do you mean their device?”
Monk realized he hadn’t filled in all the details. He described what Gray had spotted during the firefight here.
“How could that be?” Mara asked. “I kept my designs secret.”
Jason offered an explanation. “I doubt the University of Coimbra’s systems were irontight. If someone knew what you were working on, it wouldn’t have been hard to hack into your workload and spy over your shoulder.”
Monk knew few networks were truly safe. Jason himself had hacked into computers at the Department of Defense when he was practically a kid. From Mara’s silence, she didn’t discount this possibility.
“I should’ve been more careful,” she finally muttered and returned to her inspections.
Simon spoke from where he fingered a set of abandoned cords that were still spliced into the telecom trunk. “Looks like something was wired into our system here.”
The other Xénese device.
Carly stepped over to a closed laptop on a neighboring table. It was still connected to a small server bank. She opened it, igniting the screen—then gasped. “Come see this.”
An image was frozen on the screen: a blasted garden under a black sun. It looked like a dark mirror version of what shone on the other laptop.
Mara reached fingers toward the screen, toward a fiery figure crushed under the weight of molten-red chains. “Eve . . . what did they do to you?”
“That’s what we need to find out,” Jason reminded everyone. “Maybe we can run some forensics on this laptop. Examine what’s loaded on the server here. Then hopefully figure out the methodology used to attack the Nogent Nuclear Power Plant.”
“Smart,” Carly acknowledged.
Monk agreed, checking his watch. “Then let’s get to work.”
A low rumble drew their eyes to the crack in the ceiling. It skittered longer, raining down a fresh stream of sandy limestone.
“And we’d better hurry,” Monk added.
2:29 A.M.
As Jason and Simon worked together to hack into the abandoned server, Mara concentrated on her own station. The press of time weighed on her. She pictured a nuclear plant’s cooling towers shattering and imploding, crumbling into radioactive slag.
“Is this the right hard drive?” Carly asked.
Mara swiped damp sweat from her brow and glanced past the edge of her table. Her friend knelt over the open titanium case, holding aloft a USB-C cable, trying to figure out which drive held Eve’s next subroutine. During their turbulent flight here, followed by the hard hike through the catacombs, several of the drives had been knocked loose, making a disarray of the case’s order.
Mara searched and pointed to the drive marked BGL1. “That one. And daisy-chain it to drives BGL2 and BGL3.”
The next subroutine was massive, even larger than the HARMONY routine used for Eve’s musical education.
Carly nodded and snapped the cord into its port.
“Wait.” Mara noted the time on the laptop. “You’d better connect that drive over there, too.”
“That houses a whole other subroutine,” Carly warned. “Are you planning to upload the two of them together?”
“I have no choice. If we’re going to pull this off in time, I’m going to have to accelerate Eve’s learning curve.”
Nearly exponentially.
Carly frowned. “Can she assimilate that much information at once?”
“She’ll have to.”
Mara popped a second USB-C cord into her laptop and tossed the other end to Carly, who hooked it into the indicated drive. It housed a second “endocrine mirror program,” a digital hormone emulator that should pair well with BGL’s contents.
At least, I hope.
She counted on a peculiarity in Eve’s recent behavior to risk attempting this. For some unknown reason, Eve had been learning at an accelerating pace when compared to her first iteration. Mara suspected there might be some buried memory in her quantum core—the digital equivalent of a subconscious—that still retained a ghostly impression of her earlier incarnation. Maybe these latest subroutines weren’t introducing new information, but only serving as a refresher course for what was already there.
Unfortunately, Mara couldn’t know for sure. Like many advanced systems, the exact mechanism by which Eve “thought” remained locked up inside her algorithmic black box.
By now, Monk had joined her, hovering at her shoulder. The man had been shifting back and forth between her workstation and the other where Simon and Jason labored. “I still don’t understand,” he said. “Why do we need to teach your version of the program before using it as a tool to countermand the first cyberattack? Clearly the Crucible managed just fine with what they stole from you.”
Mara looked over at the other laptop, at the dark garden, the fiery angel in chains. “They had to have broken her first, forced her to do their bidding. What they’ve turned her into . . .” She shook her head. “It’s going to be volatile, unpredictable, and extraordinarily dangerous. A veritable demon.”
“Then why not create another one?” Monk asked. “To fight fire with fire.”
Mara felt sick at this thought, all too aware of how much Eve looked like her mother. She could never torture her creation. But she had another reason, too.
“If that ever happened,” she warned, “we’d never survive that firefight. That war of demons would destroy us.”
“Why?”
Mara turned to him, glancing from his crudely bandaged arm to the scars on his face. “You were once a soldier, right?”
He slowly nodded. “Yeah?”
“War is a powerful motivator for innovation and ingenuity. It’s not always the army with the greatest firepower that wins a battle, but instead, it’s the opposing force that proves itself to be smarter, faster, more versatile in strategy and technology.”
“Sure. But so what?”
“In the scenario you described, unleashing demon against demon, both sides will try to surpass the other in order to survive. They will sharpen their swords against one another, honing their intelligence. And we’re talking about an intelligence already vastly superior to our own. When pitted against each other, they will become even more brilliant, ever more dangerous, their intelligence skyrocketing. Whoever wins, we will be ants before an angry god.”
Monk’s face paled with this thought. “Then you’d better not fail.”
“All done,” Carly interrupted, her bright eyes shadowed with the same concern. She stood up and joined Mara.