Nicole Ellis woke with a start. She immediately reached across the bed and noticed that Alex was gone.
After PHOEBE had shocked Nikki with its cryptic response to her command, she had tried for hours to get her algorithm to respond to additional instructions with no results. PHOEBE had effectively locked her out, with no explanation as to why.
Exhausted after several attempts to reengage with her creation and unsure what to do next, Nikki finally logged off the system and crawled into bed with Alex around 2:30am, where she proceeded to stare at the ceiling, unable to sleep.
She knew that their 4:30am wake up time would come quickly, and it only heightened her anxiety about being unable to sleep. She thought about simply staying up all night before drifting off into a short, restless slumber.
Still lying in bed, she looked over at the alarm clock, a thirty-year old wind up device with face hands instead of digits, similar to the one Nikki’s grandmother had. It was purposefully not an electronic clock, but an isolated device, one that both Nikki and Alex preferred. She saw that it was 5:47am. She had overslept.
“Alex…?” she instinctively called out in the early morning darkness.
She reached over and turned on the lamp before she pushed aside the covers and sat up.
She looked around the bedroom of the small two-bedroom apartment that they currently called home, and a flash of memory made her take stock of how much her life had changed in the past eighteen months.
She used to live in a multimillion-dollar Manhattan high rise with expensive albeit sparse furnishings, and now all of her belongings were contained in a half a dozen plastic containers, which consisted of their clothes and personal items, along with several practice Kali sticks in a neat pile. Beside those items were an old phonograph player and a milk crate of albums, most of them classical music. That was all that she and Alex owned.
The phonograph and records belonged to Alex, a comforting reminder of the first person who saw him for what he was, but he rarely listened to these albums now. Still, they were his only personal items, and he took care to bring them to wherever the family called home.
Nikki got to her feet and slipped on a pair of jeans, then a T-shirt, before tying her hair back in a ponytail. She quickly put on her sneakers, laced them, and exited the apartment. She tried to put aside her thoughts on PHOEBE and focus on her training.
The family, formerly Master Winn’s students, now all studying under Alex, was becoming larger and more philosophical under his leadership. The one thing that hadn’t changed since Winn’s death and the family’s return from Trans Dniester was that, as an off-grid entity, the family was always on the move, even if PHOEBE provided ample cover for their current whereabouts. And their current location was the abandoned Naval Base on Terminal Island in Long Beach, California.
Nikki, along with Camilla Ramirez, Yaw Chimonso, Chris Aldrich, Joey Nugyen, and relative newcomer Masha Tereshchenko had become decidedly closer to one another since Winn’s death, and they trusted in Alex completely, even when his actions didn’t make sense to them.
Alex had fought his instincts for isolation and tried to strengthen his bond with all members of the family, but it had not been easy for him. His observation skills required a certain amount of distance from others, and it had proven a hard habit for Alex to break, even with those he had grown to love.
That distance from others that defined Alex was something that Nikki had slowly grown accustomed to. Alex was a loner by nature and design, but he had always been honest, loyal, and above all else, kind.
Alex’s tendency to be secretive and introspective was something that Nikki no longer felt threatened by. Alex needed to think things out before sharing. He needed time to assemble the data of any given situation before engaging, which was why when Alex revealed his memory concerns to Kunchin during their visit to the Potala Palace in Tibet it had taken Nikki completely by surprise.
“Do not stop planting seeds, Alex, wherever you go.”
These were the final words the Buddhist monk had said to Alex. But it wasn’t what the old monk said to Alex that worried Nikki, it was the harsh warning Kunchin had given her.
When Nikki tried to investigate PHOEBE’s actions, the program had effectively locked her out, at least for the moment, and the possibilities of why and what could go wrong kept spiraling through her mind.
If PHOEBE was becoming self-aware and beginning to make her own decisions, Nikki had to backtrack through every isolated command instruction, every cause and effect vector in order to put together what could influence PHOEBE’s decision-making matrix. Only Nikki had ever interacted with PHOEBE directly, so Nikki’s actions would become PHOEBE’s first guide by design.
Nikki had to wonder, what did PHOEBE learn from me? At what depth and detail had PHOEBE analyzed both Nikki’s behavior and command sets? Did PHOEBE learn from the hopeful side of Nikki? Or the fearful one? How much data did PHOEBE truly have access to?
PHOEBE had proven extremely effective in keeping the family off grid by creating a cyber void around them—the entire family was in the program’s database. So it was quite possible that PHOEBE was learning from all of them.
Nikki already knew that if identifying markers—face, driver’s license, passport, social security number, any history personal history that could be tracked by modern technology—were fed into PHOEBE’s algorithms, the program could literally ghost you out of the system. Security cameras would not recognize you. Watch lists would not track you. Passport and social security number crosschecks would lead to dead ends. Credit card purchases were encrypted and rerouted through anonymous Bit Coin accounts. Even imputing your name into a basic search engine would lead to wherever PHOEBE chose.
Through electronic tracking, PHOEBE made sure you didn’t exist. And in a world of seven billion people, where electronic surveillance was increasingly depended upon, you were a ghost, able to move about the globe with little to stop you. It was a simple algorithm that Nikki felt should not be causing wide-scale problems. That the Terminal Island compound was not swarming with police or Coalition Assurance soldiers was clear evidence that, despite locking Nikki out, PHOEBE still kept her primary mandate to protect them intact. But for how much longer?
In Nikki’s mind, there was no room in the command set for PHOEBE to go off script. And yet she had. PHOEBE shouldn’t be interfering with other systems that had nothing to do with protecting the family, and yet evidence was becoming clearer and clearer that she was. And before Nikki could question PHOEBE on this, the software had locked her out.
Nikki knew that PHOEBE’s calculative power was considerable, perhaps evidenced best by the downing the world’s largest military drone.
Something dawned on Nikki with that thought. Perhaps it was when Nikki tasked PHOEBE to take down the drone that the software program had broken free and began to act out on its own. Perhaps it was this command set, which allowed PHOEBE to override all others because of the urgency of the situation, that permitted the program to launch its own narrative.
It was well within PHOEBE’s original programming to fend off attacks from the NSA’s less sophisticated Black Widow program, but the command to take down the drone had been something entirely different. It had been an override command. And now, perhaps, PHOEBE felt she could override any command she chose and start making decisions on her own, decisions that were only based loosely on Nikki’s requests.
What would happen when PHOEBE stepped beyond Nikki’s programming entirely? What would happen if she chose to make decisions outside of Nikki’s control? What if PHOEBE decided that a programming request would become the software’s overall mandate, with every other command reconciled with this self-chosen mandate? Was this the glitch Nikki was searching for? And what did PHOEBE mean when she said, “The end of the animal is near?” Did it mean that it was too late?
Guilt overwhelmed Nikki. PHOEBE was her heart and soul, and if it ever hurt anyone, Nikki could never forgive herself. Maybe I should have never created her at all, Nikki thought.
Nikki pushed thoughts of PHOEBE aside. The program existed, and wishing it didn’t or feeling guilty that it did accomplished nothing. Nikki was PHOEBE’s creator, and as such she would fix the problem. She was confident that she could do so, and there was no reason to be unduly alarmed. At least that’s what she kept telling herself.
PHOEBE not talking to Nikki was unacceptable, and she would start a conversation with the software with that premise, even if she had to create back door routes into her core programming. The “silent treatment” PHOEBE was engaged in would not work. And until she had a better grasp of what needed to be changed, Nikki would limit her commands to the program, lest those commands become some overall mandate that Nikki couldn’t control. Nikki knew she would have to proceed with caution.
Much like Alex, in regards to his memory issues, Nikki chose not to disclose her concerns regarding PHOEBE to anyone until she had a better understanding of what was going on. She surmised that Alex’s motivations for not revealing his memory issues were not altogether different from hers in regards to PHOEBE. There was no reason to upset anyone with incomplete data. She would solve the problem before alarming anyone.
This was how both Nikki and Alex worked. And as long as there was trust between them, Nikki couldn’t be upset with Alex in how he chose to reveal his vulnerabilities via sage advice from the Buddhist monk, and vice versa regarding these new developments with PHOEBE.
The more time she spent with Alex, the more she realized they were very much alike. In Nikki’s mind, it was becoming clearer every day that their pairing was no accident. She turned her thoughts back to Alex and realized that the more time she spent with him, the more amazed she became by his ability to influence others. And their recent trip only made the extent of his influence more visible.
The passage through the Siachen Glacier on the way back to America had been Alex’s idea. He seemed revitalized by Kunchin’s words and wanted to put them to the test. And he wanted to do it by seeing if he could alter the dynamics of individuals hardened by war and ideology.
Despite having witnessed Alex in action in the past, as well as experiencing the impact of his pattern-reading abilities first hand, she had been amazed by Alex’s effectiveness on the Siachen. Alex’s ability to read the momentum of another person’s life, particularly the lives of several hardened soldiers all at once, seemed to indicate no lack of detail recollection or memory problems on Alex’s part.
“Finite emotions and belief systems based on inflexible ideologies are the easiest to read,” Alex had always told her.
The capacity to kill another human being requires an unshakeable ideological narrative and dehumanizes anyone who those willing to kill fear about their victims. Hardened beliefs by definition were rigid data sets, self-enforcing, not self-correcting. And the narratives created by rigid belief systems must exclude all other options or possibilities in order for both the belief system and the believer in that system to survive. It was this inability for a believer to change their narrative that made a believer’s destiny so predictable for Alex.
“When I speak to them,” he had told Nikki, “I show them who they really are, and in doing so, I destroy the false narrative created by their false beliefs. In the Siachen, I showed them the destructive patterns of behavior that led them atop a frozen glacier for the sole reason of killing others, which began long before many of those young men were born. I showed them that this is not who they really are. I showed them that the person on the other end of their rifle is human. I made them understand the sanctity of life. I made them feel it. And in doing so, in holding them accountable to reality, I opened their minds for other possibilities.”
To witness this in action was nothing less than stunning to Nikki, every single time.
Whatever memory issues Alex claimed to have while in Tibet had not been visible on the Siachen. But what had happened on the India-Pakistan border was different than what she’d seen him do before. For the first time, it was both direct and proactive.
It was not in reaction to being hunted or captured. It was not an attempt to correct an impending event, like when Alex had saved her life. It was a larger scale redirect, and she knew there would be a cost to actions like these, not just for Alex but for everyone in the family.
With the disruption Alex’s “planting seeds” was causing, Nikki knew that neither Alex, herself, the family, nor PHOEBE for that matter, could remain in the shadows much longer. This was beyond being chased by Coalition Properties. It wasn’t about surviving or being “on the run” anymore. It was about changing global paradigms convincingly, one person at a time.
Nikki didn’t need Alex’s level of clairvoyance to know the amount of pushback this effort would cause. The powers that be, from Coalition Properties and beyond, would stop at nothing to get to Alex and the family now. This would have to be planned for. And with PHOEBE behaving erratically, the challenges ahead were going to be great.
But she had faith in Alex. And more importantly, she had faith in herself. Surviving her encounter with Lucas Parks in Trans Dniester and seeing to what lengths both Alex and the family were willing to go through to save her only strengthened her belief.
It had been a whirlwind of travel and activity since Tibet. Yaw had contacted them about what was happening in Mexico, and they had barely arrived in time to free hundreds of migrants from slave traders. A sixteen-year-old boy had died saving his younger sister, and Nikki knew Alex would feel responsible.
Ten-year-old Maria Martinez, refugee and orphan, was now part of the family. Both she and Alex felt it best that Maria stay with Camilla, Yaw, and their daughter Kylie for the time being, until they could create a more stable environment for the young girl.
After arriving from Mexico at the abandoned apartment complex on Terminal Island, a locale for the family that Camilla had arranged, they were all so exhausted they barely had time to speak about what was next, but they would do so, and soon.
She hoped that this morning’s training session would revitalize and orient them all. And afterword she and Alex would have time to finally clear the air on what they’d been keeping from one another. She hoped that for the first time since they became a couple, since Alex had literally stepped into fate and saved her life, they could plan what was next as a team.
Nikki turned the corner to find Alex seated and meditating on the small patch of lawn next to the apartment building, which was a former barracks of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard on Terminal Island, closed in 1997. The first rays of daylight gave the angular horizon of the abandoned shipyard an eerie feel. Camilla had picked the 119-acre Terminal Island outposts because several of the 160 plus buildings on the island were abandoned. It was an easy location to house people and go unnoticed, at least temporarily.
As Nikki approached Alex, he slowly opened his eyes. She noticed that beside him were two sets of wooden Kali sticks. When Alex saw Nikki, he smiled. As Nikki bent down to pick up a pair of sticks, Alex spoke.
“You won’t need those today,” he said, before he got to his feet.
“One should not “get up” at a five a.m.,” Masha said to no one in particular as she tried to rub the sleep from her eyes. “One should only stay up until five thirty a.m.” Dressed in sweat pants and an oversized T-shirt belonging to Chris, Masha tied her long black hair into a ponytail.
“Here,” Chris said to Masha, before handing her a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “You’ll get used to it,” he added.
Chris looked over at Yaw, then Camilla and Joey Nugyen, as they stretched and warmed up in some fashion. The location for the morning routine was a small concrete pad between empty industrial buildings on the south end of the Island. The large, rusting cranes of the shipyard, parts of which that were now leased to China, were visible in the background.
“He’s here,” Chris said to Yaw as he nodded west.
The group glanced in Alex and Nikki’s direction and simultaneously got to their feet. They took note, looking at one another, when they saw that neither Alex nor Nikki carried weapons. Not even the traditional Kali sticks for training.
Alex stopped at the head of the group and looked them over. Yaw broke from the group and approached Alex. The men shook hands and exchanged a brief hug.
“Ready when you are,” Yaw said to Alex.
Alex nodded, noting the eager expressions of the group. They were ready to learn.
“You do not become expert by only practicing what is advanced,” Alex began. “You become expert by having a thorough understanding of the basics. The basics begin long before any conflict arises. Before any weapon is raised.”
Alex looked over the group again to make sure he had their undivided attention.
“Today’s lesson regards cause and effect,” Alex continued. “Understanding this is the first step of any learning, the first step in recognizing any pattern. Now pair up and follow me.”