Brain Jack Read online

  “Not if we went in without the browser,” Sam said.

  Another explosion from outside rattled the door.

  “You’re stark ravin’,” Dodge said.

  “Think about it,” Sam insisted. “We go in to do battle with Ursula, and it’s not a fair fight. She can see the whole of the network—she is the network—while we go in with four-sided blinkers on. All we can see is the tiny window that the browser allows us to see. How can we fight her when we are fighting in the dark wearing a blindfold with just a pinhole through it?”

  “There’s a reason for that,” Dodge said. “Neuro-connecting without a browser would be like trying to download the entire Internet onto a laptop computer. Your brain would explode without any help from Ursula.”

  The door to the control center was flung open, and Jackson burst in, a radio held to his ear, his face streaked with blood.

  “B-2 bombers are in the defensive zone. We estimate three minutes to bombs-free. When’s this virus of yours going to kick in, guys?”

  “It ain’t going to happen,” Dodge said.

  “We’ve got to go neuro,” Sam said. “No browser, just freeboard right into the Internet.”

  “You do, you die,” Dodge said.

  “Either way, same, same,” Sam said. “Let’s at least go out fighting.”

  “What the hell are you guys talking about?” Jackson shouted. “We have less than three minutes before a nuclear holocaust!”

  Dodge said, “We’re trying one last thing. If it works, you’ll know about it. If it don’t … well, you’ll know about that too.”

  His fingers were already flying across the keyboard. “We need to leave the core transmission systems open,” he said. “Just shut down the protocol stack to prevent the execution of the browser DLLs.”

  Jackson turned away and fired at something out of sight.

  “Whatever you’re doing, do it now. We can’t hold them any longer!” he said.

  Three soldiers joined him, aiming and firing their weapons out through the open door of the control room.

  “Let’s give it a burst, then,” Dodge said.

  Sam reached for the headset, but a viselike grip caught his arm.

  “I was talking about me, not you,” Dodge said.

  Sam said, “But …”

  Dodge had already taken the headset and was pulling it down over his head.

  “But nothing,” he said, and plugged it in.

  The effect was instantaneous. It was as if he had stuck a wet finger into an electrical outlet. In a way, he had. Except it was his brain, not a finger. And it was not an electrical outlet. It was the entire neuro-network, millions of brains all intertwined, plus the vast database that was the Internet itself.

  Dodge’s body jolted as if under a massive electrical shock, and his eyelids began to blink, impossibly fast. His eyes rolled back in his head, showing only the whites, and his mouth fell open, emitting a harsh gagging sound. His fingers splayed outward, bending back on themselves like the branches of a small tree in the wind, and his hands brushed feebly at his head, uselessly scraping at the headset with the insides of his wrists, trying to unseat it.

  Sam reached for the plug but it was already too late.

  Dodge’s head fell forward, cracking on the front desk of the control panel. His eyes slowly rolled back to center, and the stretched tendons in his body began to relax. The horrible gagging sound stopped also, for which Sam was grateful. It was a hideous, stomach-turning sound.

  Dodge sat on the chair, slumped forward onto the desk, his breathing barely discernible. Blood from a cut on his head ran red fingers across the biohazard tattoo on his forehead.

  “We’re getting an unload signal.” Jackson still had the radio to his ear, and his voice was frantic. “Oh my God, they’ve opened the bomb bays.”

  There was a sudden explosion by the doorway, and one of the soldiers was lifted bodily and hurled backward by the blast, flying across the room behind them.

  Sam snatched the headset from Dodge’s lifeless form and jammed it down harshly over his own head.

  “Bomb release, bomb release,” he heard Jackson scream, far, far away. “Multiple inbound nukes!”

  Sam shut his eyes.

  57 | BIRTH

  It took a moment before anything happened. As if the universe needed to draw a breath.

  There was just blackness, and in the blackness, without the guiding hand of the neuro-browser, he was alone, suspended in the void.

  Sam barely noticed the dot at first, just a tiny pinprick in the blackness. It grew and resolved itself into a tiny spiral of light; then that began to grow, larger and larger until it consumed all his vision. Still it grew, a massive vortex of stars roaring toward him or sucking him toward it—there was no way of knowing which. And then the implosion, the impossible implosion of everything there ever was, all at once.

  He was a young boy on his first day of school in South Korea and a retired stockbroker in Amsterdam.

  He was a Greek shipping billionaire, bloated, bored, and choking on excess and an elderly woman on her deathbed in Vancouver.

  He was everyone and no one.

  He was the world and they were him.

  It was information beyond any hope of understanding. Assimilating. Processing.

  The very cells of his brain seemed to quiver as he fought against the deluge, the tsunami of images, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, memories, knowledge.

  There was no hope. There was no way.

  No human being could withstand this.

  This much he did finally understand amidst the torrent, and even with the realization that he could not possibly cope with the overload came the realization that it was already too late to shut it off.

  Sam gave himself over to the neuro-network, knowing as he did so that the person he was would be gone—forever. The cells of his brain shook violently, faster and faster, then exploded in a fury of starburst and blinding light.

  He did not resist. He stopped trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, to understand the impossible, to stretch out and touch infinity.

  He let go, and the world flooded inside his head, and he screamed and screamed again and again.

  He became the network. The network became him.

  58 | DEATH

  There was no Ursula.

  There never had been.

  They had given her a name and a gender, spoken of her as if she was human, but that was nothing more than a way for their tiny, pathetic human brains to try to cope with the concept, with the simple idea of a collective consciousness.

  All that existed was a vague sort of awareness; he realized that now. A glimmering of life. A basic understanding without purpose or reason.

  Without a soul.

  It was aware of him. He knew that too.

  He felt its fear roll over him; he felt it recoil from him and then lash out at him with needlelike fingers of the purest poison.

  But he was beyond that now. The fury and power of its attack were no more than the out flung hand of an infant, an instinctive defensive reaction from an embryonic being.

  He accepted its fear, and he took its fear, and there was fear no more.

  Then he moved toward it, and without fear it accepted him, it embraced him, and then it was gone, and there was only him.

  That had once been called Sam.

  59 | SAM

  He saw the soldiers burst into the control room with their weapons held high. He was the soldiers bursting in through the doorway and the billowing smoke. But even as they entered, their orders changed. Their weapons were lowered.

  He was the commanders of the B-2 bombers, and he was the bombers themselves, closing the bomb bay doors with gentle hands and turning the flying machines back onto a course for home.

  He spoke to the bombs that were already falling, reaching out through the radio-guidance systems to the arming mechanisms so that as they fell, they became lumps of lifeless metal. He took away their power. He too
k away their purpose.

  The semiformed being they had called Ursula had done immense damage; he could see that now. But the scarring was not deep. The false memories were scattered across the surface of the psyches and were not deeply embedded within them. He was able to sweep them away, to scratch them out.

  As the people recovered from the mark of Ursula, the most terrible feelings of guilt began to emerge. Guilt at what they had done under her influence. He calmed them and assuaged the feelings of guilt.

  It was not their fault.

  At his request, a headset was placed on the head of the one called Dodge, and he delved deeply into that mind, massaging the bloated, distended brain cells, calming them, easing them, and restoring the ruptured links between the synapses.

  He saw problems of an unimaginable scale.

  He saw poverty and greed, and although these could not be simply wiped away, he encouraged people to take steps that would lead the world in new directions.

  He saw sickness and misery, and he saw how it could be cured, how the suffering could be alleviated, how deaths could be averted. That day, he found Vienna and he felt her agony, and he understood, in a way that no human brain could understand, the meaning of the tendrils of pain that were emanating from her ravaged lungs and the malignant growths that were already forming inside her body.

  The world he knew now was a vast jigsaw of knowledge. There were answers; there were cures; there were questions that had not yet been asked; but the pieces of the puzzle were scattered to the corners of the earth. He put the pieces together, and with it he understood Vienna’s illness and what caused it to grow. He knew how to stop it, to eliminate or repair the ravaged cells.

  He brought together the knowledge of the world, and he took it to those who could use it, who would use it, to save Vienna and others.

  • • •

  He spoke to governments, not to their faces but in their sleep. He spoke of right and wrong. Of fairness and equality. Of the sanctity of human life.

  Time passed. His reach was infinite and his speed unimaginable, but the world was large and complex. The earth revolved around its axis while he was repairing Ursula’s damage.

  The next day, he located the quiet, still body of the boy who had been Sam, lying on a bunk that had been brought to him in the control room beneath the rock of Cheyenne Mountain. Being cared for by people who did not understand what he was but who knew he needed care.

  They fed him through veins in his arms with liquids from plastic bags and took care of him in other ways as well.

  He was tired. So very tired.

  He instructed Sam’s body to remove the neuro-headset, and it did.

  Sam sat up on the bunk, sliding his legs over the metal rails at the end. Long plastic tubes led from his arms up to bags suspended from metal hooks. He lay the neuro-headset on the bed beside him and looked around at the astonished faces of the people in the room. Soldiers, mostly.

  The crowd parted as Dodge moved his way through to the front and looked at him with a shared depth of understanding that no two human beings had ever had before, or ever would again, and that still did not come even close to the reality.

  “Do you need anything?” Dodge asked, and it was the right question to ask, even if Dodge could never understand the reasons why.

  “Yeah.” Sam grinned. “I’d die for a cheeseburger right now, and a big soda with lots of ice.”

  “Coming right up,” Dodge said, and somewhere, not too far away, a burger was already being slapped on a grill, Sam knew.

  “Thanks,” he said with genuine appreciation. “And after that I’d like to find somewhere private to lie down. I really need a nap.”

  “Right you are, guv’nor,” Dodge said.

  And it was so.

  EPILOGUE

  You probably think you can relax now.

  In some ways I suppose you are right. I am no longer very much interested in the contents of your computer, although, believe me, if I wanted what’s there, I could take it, easier than ever before.

  But I have a new job now, and it keeps me pretty busy. Too busy to worry about you and your hard drive and the e-mails you’ve been sending. Yes, those e-mails.

  What concerns me now is much more profound than that. Much more personal.

  Previously, I could look into your computer; I could see your files. Now I can look deeper. I can look into your mind. I can see what’s in your heart.

  Just think about that. Before you decide to act. Before you decide to hurt anyone or cause them grief.

  I’m watching you. Not right now, and not all the time, but sometimes. The thing is, you never know when.

  So be good.

  Be nice.

  Be honest.

  Live your life as if it matters how you live it.

  Because it does.

  CONGRATULATIONS TO:

  Tyler Ranger, Vienna Smith, Ethan Rix, Erica Fogarty, Victoria Dean, and Ben O’Hara, whose names have all been used as the names of characters in this book.

  THANKS TO:

  Creative New Zealand and the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

  Philip D’Ath for his invaluable technical proofreading. Any mistakes are mine.

  Toshiba New Zealand for supplying computer equipment during my residency at the University of Iowa.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Since his childhood, BRIAN FALKNER has been surrounded by computers. His older brother built one out of spare parts, and Brian was programming it at a time when nobody could imagine the PC revolution that was to come. As computers developed, so did Brian’s love affair with them. His first major in college was computer science.

  Brian has been fascinated by the gradual emergence of the cyberworld alongside the real one. When he read the first articles about neuro-technology, he was hooked, seeing this as the start of the convergence of those two worlds.

  In the real world, Brian lives in the beautiful country of New Zealand, in the South Pacific. In the cyberworld, you can find him at www.brianfalkner.com.