KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE
Another late-night marathon in the lab. Nothing new.
Parsons seriously considered sleeping on the couch in her office for the next two days. Catnaps, anyway. There was a shower in the facility and even a decent selection of organics stocked in the kitchen pantry. Anything to save time, because time was the one thing she didn’t have.
Phase One of TRIBULATION was scheduled to launch in less than thirty-six hours. The timeline was immutable.
So was she.
The project had come along nicely, but in this last final stretch she needed to have her own steady hand on the rudder. They were too close to the end for delegating responsibilities. It was her baby. She was the one who needed to climb into the stirrups and push for all she was worth, no matter the cost. That was a mother’s duty, wasn’t it?
Parsons checked her analog watch again—security protocols that she had implemented prohibited digital devices of any kind on this level. She sat in the conference room waiting for her Phase Two division heads to arrive for her first meeting of the evening.
The Ukrainian Matvienko headed up the Russian software interface, and his counterpart, the Taiwanese programmer Yu, ran the parallel Chinese effort. These were pioneering software geniuses on the cutting edge of a newly emergent branch of human knowledge.
They had made outstanding progress on Phase Two but there was still so much to do in so little time. She needed a progress report from them, and then later, the TRIBULATION systems engineers.
Failure was simply not an option.
She picked up her pen and began scribbling notes for the first meeting in her notebook but stopped, the thought of Dylan Runtso’s body shredded like a plate of pulled pork flooding her mind. It was a sudden, violent death that ended the life of one of the most brilliant men she’d ever known, or fucked.
She smiled.
The greasy little bastard had it coming.
It was too bad. He would have shared in the glory to come, and the money, had he remained true to his loyalties, which at first had been her, and then later, TRIBULATION. Betraying one had betrayed both. That was something she couldn’t abide. Dylan needed to be dealt with. She made a phone call. It wasn’t emotional. It wasn’t personal. It was only the simple computational instruction every programmer learned on day one; the most basic of all control flow statements: if, then.
This was the most rational and primary means by which the decision to execute a code could be made.
Code, or people.
It was simple, pure, binary.
If a certain condition was true (guilt), then the prescribed course of action was taken. If a certain condition were not true (innocence), then the prescribed course of action was not taken.
Dylan actually executed himself. He chose his condition when he betrayed TRIBULATION—or attempted to—and thus his execution was inevitable.
Cause and effect. Linear and inexorable.
But Parsons knew quantum mechanics stood outside of linearity because it was non-localized in either time or space. Israeli scientists had proven that in 2013 when they swapped an entangled pair of temporally separated photons—one future, one past—and detected the polarization of the future photon before the past one was even created.
Effect, then cause.
Dylan had executed himself the day he decided to betray her.
She rubbed her eyes and stretched to push away the failed musings of her amateur philosophizing. It had been a long damn day and the FBI grilling hadn’t improved her mood. She knew she’d passed their oral examination with a decent grade.
The only thing that disturbed her was the idea that Dylan’s death had been made known so quickly. His true identity was as invisible as a quark to almost everyone on the planet, thanks to the DOE’s identity-scrubbing program. How he’d been identified so quickly in Spain was troublesome, but not worth her attention at the moment. Security wasn’t her department. She’d left that to others. Perhaps that was another reason she felt no guilt over Dylan’s death. There was no blood on her hands, was there?
She saw Matvienko and Yu in deep discussion, heading her way. Her mind snapped into focus. She opened her laptop and pulled up the project management flow chart she’d been using for nearly two years. It looked like an underground metro map in the world’s largest city, with huge decision nodes like metro stops sprawling across a succession of digital pages. Each decision node was connected by intricate track lines of responsibilities, timelines, and sub-decision points. More than ninety-eight percent of the chart had been executed and displayed in red. But it was these last few precious stops that led toward the final destination they needed to check off tonight. Judging by the smiles on both men’s faces as they stepped into the conference room, those last decision nodes were about to turn red.
Hallelujah, as her mother used to say.
There was, however, one pubic hair in the organic hummus. Her stomach suddenly sank as if she were falling off a rooftop.
Could these two men be trusted?
Could anyone on this project be trusted?
Dylan Runtso’s betrayal had nearly killed everything she’d worked her whole life to achieve. TRIBULATION would change the world forever. Dylan’s treason was a stunningly selfish act, a betrayal of science itself. She’d thought he was as committed to the project’s success as she was if only because he was as committed to the science as she had always been. Perhaps that was the reason why his betrayal was the “black swan” event she hadn’t predicted or prepared for.
What had suddenly frightened her was the obvious and secondary question. Didn’t swans usually travel in flocks?