Were the Twins watching? He didn’t really care, so long as they didn’t try to stop him.
He had ten million SRNs so far. SRNs with no limits. SRNs that would replicate and replicate, doubling in number and doubling again and again and again until there were not millions but billions, trillions, as many as there were grains of sand on all the beaches of the world.
What was the famous quote from 1984? He Googled it. He wanted to get it right. Ah, there.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
Well, no, Mr. Orwell, Burnofsky thought. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a world scoured clean of every living thing. And more. Imagine that having taken and used all the easiest forms of carbon the SRNs keep going. They eat the steel out of buildings, the coal and oil and diamond out of the earth itself. They wouldn’t just destroy all life, they would relentlessly remove all possibility that life would ever again arise to trouble an empty planet.
His eye scanned down the page of quotes from Orwell and came to rest on this: Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
Hah. Well, the Twins had tried it. The Twins, with their mad plan to unite all of humanity into one vast interconnectedness. A new world where they would be accepted. And more than accepted: esteemed, loved.
And Lear? What was young Lystra Reid’s motive?
Burnofsky’s own motive was clear to him now. He had done evil for ambition’s sake. He had tortured himself for that evil and sought to close the eyes of the world to his shame.
Then he had been rewired so that the evil gave him pleasure. And now he would close the eyes of the world because it would bring him pleasure.
He would wait for a few more doublings. Then he would drop the force fields that held the SRNs contained and unleash the gray goo.
Then? Well, then he would go back to his old haunt, back to the China Bone. There would be time for them to prepare him a pipe. He would float on a cloud of purple opium haze and wait for the end of the world. When the nanobots reached him, well, that’s when he would take a last drink and fire the heroin into his veins and leave the world behind, dying with two raised middle fingers to humanity.
Suarez wished she had music, but the cockpit was not large enough to allow her to reach for her headphones. It was just that the mad rush of sheer speed demanded some propulsive music to go along with it.
It was crazy. It was also crazy fun.
The sleigh was a dream to drive. Computer-assists and automated systems made it more like a video game than a craft moving at a hundred and fifty miles an hour. The little icon that was the sleigh on the GPS display was zooming along past … well, past nothing, really. This was Antarctica. There were no towns, houses, roads, or any feature, really, aside from the blur of ice and the gray blanket of hazy, overcast sky. The target was coming closer very fast, and she didn’t really have much of a plan for how to approach it.
Most likely roaring in at three times freeway speeds—with jet engines screaming and ice crystals trailing a plume—was a bad idea. The smart move would probably be to park the sleigh a few miles away from the target and walk in on foot. Much more subtle that way. But on the ice one did not casually decide to abandon a vehicle that provided shelter and warmth. Not to mention a vehicle with an impressive array of weapons.
So she would try to bluff it out. Whoever she encountered would probably suspect her cover story was nonsense, but what could they do about it, really?
“People who buy illegal missiles and smuggle them onto the ice?” she said aloud. “Plenty. That’s what they can do: plenty.”
On the other hand, Suarez was only the third woman ever to qualify for SEALs, so she was no weakling. She was formidable.
“That’s right, talk yourself into it,” she muttered.
It was a good thing she had the computer navigating, because she would never have seen the dry valley. It was a rift in the ice, which at this point was a relatively sparse two hundred meters thick.
Part of her just wanted to keep shooting across the ice, but she slowed reluctantly and nosed the sleigh closer to the edge of the valley. Still she could see nothing ahead of her but ice and more ice.
“On foot it is, then,” she muttered. With great reluctance she raised the canopy, unwedged herself, and managed to climb rather ungracefully out. The wind was doing thirty knots—gentle by local standards—just enough to push cold stilettos through every seam, every zipper, every opening in her parka. She pulled on her bear claw mittens, cinched the neck strap a bit tighter, and leaned into the wind to walk what seemed to be the last hundred yards.
She didn’t see the edge of the precipice until she was practically on top of it.
“Whoa.” Antarctica had millions of square miles of same-old, same-old, but hidden here and there in the largely unexplored continent there were features that would take your breath away. This was one of those times.
The ice fell away in a sheer cliff just beyond the toes of her boots. Spread out below her was a narrow valley shaped like a boat hull—pointed at the near end, rounded at the far end. Suarez’s position would correspond to just off the starboard bow.
The topography was not complicated; it was effectively a big, oblong hole in the ice, maybe two kilometers long, a quarter that in width at the widest point. The floor of the valley was reddish gravel and looked like an abandoned quarry. About where the cabin would be on a yacht was a series of structures—four buildings, one quite large by polar standards, and, sure enough, under a plastic dome there was unmistakably a swimming pool.