“He’s okay, right?” Alan asked, chest heaving with pain, blood still trailing down the side of his own face.
“Just shut-up for a minute,” Riley’s voice snapped. She was literally using his hands from a thousand miles away to help triage and treat their friend. O’Brien had brought up the unit’s trauma sleeve just in case it was needed.
“We need to get somewhere with a lot less heat. What’s close, O’Brien?”
The man thought about it briefly, then keyed the nav system. “Rolling!” The SUV sped away from the curb and into the darkness of the New York street.
“Micah, you with us, man?” Alan asked in a voice still shaky from all the action and adrenaline.
Riley’s voice came through, “Tox is coming in, they have him knocked out. Some derivative of Ketamine it appears. Best just to let him sleep it off. Other vitals are within the normal range. He’ll be okay, Alan, at least physically. You did good.”
The relief flooded through him washing away much of the stress, almost as effectively as the sound of genuine praise from the one person he valued the most.
“Thanks.”
She continued, speaking privately now through his CommDot, “What about you? You took a vicious shot in your armor. Your suit is still giving warning alerts and it appears you may have a concussion.”
“I’m fine Riley…thanks but I’m okay.” Looking down at his unconscious friend all he could feel was relief.
He turned to Coffee who was nursing his own injuries, “Master Sergeant, thank you, too. Both of you. We wouldn’t have made it out if it had been me on my own. I guess that’s obvious.”
“Hey, it’s cool, man,” the big man said. “What you did back there was crazy nasty but pretty damn awesome, too. Maybe we need to learn how to combine brains and brawn on future ops….not just one or the other.”
“Hooah, Master Sergeant, hooah!”
* * *
Several hours later, a very relieved and very tired Riley sat with Jimmy and Jazmine eating dinner. They had attempted to shield the youngest member of the team from the actual danger his brother was walking into, but that had obviously been pointless.
Between mouthfuls of food, Jimmy said, “Yeah, I was watching via a set of micro-drones I had self-deploy from the Battlewagon.”
“The Battlewagon?” Jaz asked curiously.
Riley nodded, somewhat embarrassed. “Guys,” she said, as if that was all the explanation needed. She downed more of the energy drink she was holding and added, “Our custom SUVs, when they are kitted out for field-ops, they started calling them Battlewagons. It’s stupid but…you know.”
Jaz needed an understanding. “So, you weren’t worried, Jimmy?”
“Nah, he had a Talon team of spec-ops guys backing him up. They wouldn’t have let him get into too much trouble.”
Riley gave a small chuckle. “Not sure what your little bug cameras were showing, but it looked pretty serious to us. Alan has a concussion, and one of the other guy's arm has a compound fracture”
“Yeah, but did you see him? The big guy, what’s his name? The Sergeant.”
“Coffee.”
“Yeah, Coffee, broken arm and all, he still took out those last two guys.”
Riley could see that no matter the intelligence level, Alan’s little brother still had his super-hero worship dialed up to the max. She was pretty sure this was to him much like one of his video games. “I think your brother was pretty instrumental in getting Micah out, too. Don’t sell him short.”
Jimmy scooped another bite of the roast pork and potatoes off the plate. “You just like him, but yeah, he did okay.”
Embarrassment flushed across her face briefly before a smile crept in. She did like him, always had, but best keep that to herself for now.
“How is Micah anyway?” Jaz asked.
Riley’s face darkened. “He’s stable—should be okay.”
“But?”
“I don’t know. He should have regained consciousness by now. With whatever is going on in New York, they can’t really transport him, but I really want Doctor Han to be able to give him a full exam. We have no idea what those interrogators might’ve done to him.”
Riley didn’t go into any more detail, not with Jimmy there, but she had so many concerns and even more unanswered questions. This was not the time, she knew, but it was obvious that Micah’s role with Doris had been kept in the shadows. Much like Director Stansfield’s obvious knowledge of Doris, it all made her uneasy. She, Jimmy and her friends had helped build Doris. Now they had literally put their lives in her hands. Well, she thought, if she had hands.
Riley realized her appetite had vanished, and the conversation had moved on as she pondered the other questions. Jazmine was talking to Jimmy about space stuff, something about ''Oumuamua, the messenger asteroid. She excused herself to check on more earthly matters, namely the newest arrival to The Cove.
* * *
Jim Lasko was nearly seventy years old; it had been almost thirty years earlier that he’d last been within this building. He wandered around the area known as ‘The Hub,’ which formerly housed the control room for the large dish listening array, still mounted high overhead.
“I’m going to leave him to you for the dog and pony show,” Isabella said, patting Riley’s arm and walking past.
Riley had given the intro presentation numerous times already but never to anyone this connected to the facility…to Doris. She always thought of herself and her friends as the original crew. Seeing the delight in the old man’s eyes brought her joy, though. It offered a momentary lift from the crushing drama that seemed to be her ever-present shadow today. “Doctor Lasko?”
The man turned; a smile still carved across his wrinkled face. “Hello, my child, do you know I rocked that girl on my knee when she was just a baby?” He nodded his head toward the white corridor where Izzy could still be seen in the distance. Not here, but at their home in California. They had me come out for the holidays one year.”
“Must have been an amazing time,” Riley said honestly.
He nodded, his mind obviously drifting back to those days. “Simpler, easier even, though it didn’t seem like it at the time. Most people thought we were crackpots. Hell, most still do. Messages from outer space,” he muttered as he seemed to drift off again. “Maybe we were.”
Doris hadn’t revealed much to the man, she realized. They normally saved the message for the end of the orientation, but Riley had wondered if she would continue to do so this time.
“Is she here?”
“Who? Riley asked, momentarily confused. “Oh, you mean Doris?” Why had Doris not spoken with the man who was in many ways her co-creator? “She has a lot going on at the moment, Doctor. Janus seems to have gone to ground, and our teams are struggling to find his next target.”
He nodded. “Call me Jim or Lasko…I’m sure there are too many doctors running around this place anyway. You and that young man that rescued me, Micah, and I would suppose the other one as well. You were the ones that helped rebuild Doris?”
Riley nodded, “Rebuild is inaccurate, but yes, we helped her.” She was unsure how much to say at this point. Doris was staying quiet for a reason but no doubt, she was listening in. “She originally asked us to help upgrade the facility and some of her aging hardware. Later on, we stayed on to help run the company. The for-profit organization, which we simply refer to as ‘The Cove Project,’ was essentially a joint idea. It encompasses numerous corporations, intellectual properties, various holdings and patents, as well as very profitable brokerage and licensing agreements.”
“But how?” Lasko asked.
“How what? How does an antique computer and a bunch of kids do this?” she asked.
“No, well, sort of. I mean, she was no inventor; she was…is…” He seemed uncertain as to how to say what he was thinking. “Doris was created to be an analyst, an explorer. A…a help to the scientific team around her. Originally, of course, to study the heavens for anomalous signals. What you have described, what I have seen, is beyond that mission by an order of magnitude.”
The older man looked around the pristine room, he’d yet to venture into the rest of the facility, yet seemed to guess there were many more wonders to behold here. “I’m sorry, child, I don’t think I got your name.”
“Riley,” she said, smiling.
“Riley, you are very bright, as are your friends, so I’m not going to beat around the bush. Undoubtedly, you know my theory on Super AI needing to occur somewhat organically—to grow and learn much as humans do.”
Riley nodded.
“This can occur more rapidly in artificial systems, especially ones unencumbered by slow hardware, but it is still a measurable, predictable evolution. You can almost apply Moore’s law to it.”
She knew he was referring to one of Intel’s co-founder’s big ideas back in the 1960s on how fast computer chips could grow over time. Gordon Moore stated that roughly every 18 months, the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto an integrated circuit double, allowing manufacturers to continue making faster and smaller devices, essentially for the same amount of cost.
Lasko continued unabated, “While there is a physical impasse to Gordon’s law, simply due to the size and resistance of electrons, the evolution cannot go on forever. New, more specialized chip design, and of course, the so-called Q-chips would eventually allow his predictions to speed up.” He seemed to recognize he was getting off track and purposefully drug the dialogue back on course.
“Sorry, very sorry…you know all that, I’m sure. My point is, Doris should not be capable of all this. Something else happened, and I would like to know what.”
“Jim, can you be trusted?” he heard the sound seemingly coming out of nowhere.
Lasko looked up at the ceiling, then all around the room with a look of a five-year-old expecting a pony at his birthday party. He smiled and looked conspiratorially at Riley mouthing, “Is that her?”
“You can talk to me directly, Jim, and please answer the question.”