CHAPTER 23

I snapped awake with a rush of terror. Rachel was behind the wheel of the pickup truck, and we were moving. I lay crumpled on the floor on the passenger side. Pulling myself onto the seat, I saw that we were racing down a deserted rural highway. There was nothing behind us but empty road.

"How did you get in?" I asked. "Did I not lock the door?"

She didn't look at me. "You locked it. There was a piece of heavy wire in the truck bed. I made a hook and pulled the lock from inside the doorframe."

"Where are we?"

"Almost to Caryville. From the signs, it looks like I-75 runs through there."

I shook the remnants of the Jerusalem dream from my head. How long had I been unconscious? "Where's the SWAT team?"

"Looking for us, I'm sure."

I was certain that Rachel had betrayed our destination to the NSA. So why was she driving me down a deserted road? Maybe she was driving back toward Frozen Head.

"I know what you're thinking," she said. "But you're wrong. Someone else had to know about Frozen Head Park. Maybe you told someone at Trinity about it. Ravi Nara? Before you started hating each other?"

"No. You're the only person alive who knew about that cave. At least about its connection to me."

I rolled down the window, leaned out, and scanned the sky. I saw nothing, at least in the space visible between the trees that lined the narrow blacktop. Was there any reason Geli Bauer's people wouldn't move in if they knew where I was? I couldn't think of one. Anything Geli wanted from me she would get quicker by torturing me than by following me.

"If you're not helping them, why are you still with me?"

Rachel looked at me then, her eyes filled with sad¬ness. "I'm not even going to answer that."

I wanted to believe in her, but I'd be a fool to do so. "Look… if you didn't tell them about Frozen Head, they could not have been waiting there."

"You're missing something," she insisted. "You have to be."

"No. My father and brother are dead. The NSA would have to be able to read my mind to know-"

I froze with my mouth open. Revelation had stunned me like a blow to the head.

"David? What's the matter?"

"They've done it," I whispered. "Good God."

"Done what?"

"Trinity. They've got a prototype up and running."

"How do you know?"

I put a shaking hand to my forehead. Somewhere in America, the Super-MRI scan of my brain had been loaded into a Trinity computer. And that neuromodel now existed-at least to some degree-as David Tennant. I felt as if the people hunting me had discov¬ered I had a twin brother, an evil twin who shared all my memories and would betray me on demand. The feeling of violation was absolute. My mind was my most sacred refuge from the world. I felt raped in some incomprehen¬sible way, robbed of my individuality.

Where else are they waiting for me? I wondered.

"David, don't shut me out," she pleaded. "Talk to me."

"They have my memories, Rachel. They have me, loaded into their computer. That's how they knew to be waiting at Frozen Head. They don't have to chase us anymore. They know what I'll do before I do it."

"That's impossible."

"No. That's exactly what they've been working toward for two years. I know these people. I know Peter Godin. And I know it's true."

She slowed the truck for a hairpin turn. "You're say¬ing that Fielding was right? They've been working on the computer somewhere else all along?"

"Yes. While Fielding and I screwed around trying to figure out the MRI side effects, they were building the goddamn thing at some secret location." I slapped the dashboard. "That's why they laid off certain teams dur¬ing the suspension."

"What are you talking about?"

"After we suspended the project, groups of engineers were told to take paid leave. Sometimes there were only skeleton crews in the building. The team most conspicuously absent was the Interface Team, led by a guy named Zach Levin."

"What's the Interface Team?"

"The team responsible for trying to communicate with the neuromodels once they're successfully loaded. Remember what I said at the amphitheater? If you download a human brain into a computer, what do you really have? A deaf, dumb, blind, and paralyzed human being, scared to death. Half the battle is giving that brain eyes, ears, and a voice. That's the job of the Interface Team. With the project suspended, it made sense for them to be laid off. But now I see. God, I wish Fielding were here."

Rachel glanced at me. "But if they were that close to success, why kill Fielding? If Godin actually made Trinity work, would anyone really care about medical side effects or anything else?"

"You've got a point. If they've really done it, Godin will be almost invulnerable. We don't have enough infor¬mation. Maybe-" My hands went cold. "Oh, God."

"What is it?"

"I know why they killed Fielding."

"Why?"

"They could afford to."

"What do you mean?"

"Yesterday, John Skow announced that he wasn't going to replace Fielding. I thought he was crazy. But now I understand. If they have a prototype computer up and running, Fielding isn't dead."

Rachel turned to me in confusion. "What does that mean?"

"I mean they can load Fielding's neuromodel the same way they've loaded mine. They'll have Andrew Fielding's mind at their fingertips. He can solve their remaining problems for them!"

She drove for a few moments without speaking. "Okay. Let's just say this is possible for a minute. Why would Fielding help the people who murdered him?"

An eerie feeling of admiration came over me. Peter Godin was more ruthless than I ever imagined. "Fielding's neuromodel will help them because it won't know he's been murdered. It was made six months ago, when Fielding was scanned by the Super-MRI. It has no memories of anything that's happened since then. That Andrew Fielding doesn't even know he married Lu Li."

"David, this can't be happening."

"Sure it can. We just happen to be standing close to a revolutionary leap in science. Splitting the atom. Unraveling the human genome. Cloning a sheep."

"What you're talking about isn't like those things. Liberating consciousness from the human body?"

I thought about it. "You're right. This is bigger because it will give us the ability to make those kinds of advances at an exponential rate. Or not us, exactly. Whatever you call the new form of consciousness that Trinity will evolve into. And it will evolve very fast."

"You don't know for sure that they've done it."

"They're at least part of the way there. Maybe they just have a crude version up and running. Maybe they can access my memories-pull out images, for exam¬ple-but not actually operate the model as a functioning mind. Human memory is Ravi Nara's specialty, and they made a lot of progress in that area early on. There's just no way to know."

Rachel touched my arm. "If you're right, what do they know about what we're doing now?"

"Nothing, I hope. They can't read my mind in any mystical way. They probably have my memories from childhood up to six months ago, when I was scanned by the Super-MRI. As for my thought processes, my judg¬ment, my personality-that would take a fully functional computer. And if they have that…"

"What?"

"The president won't care what happened to a couple of doctors. The nation accepts more casualties to build a skyscraper or a bridge. You and I are a negligible price to pay for the strategic superiority Trinity will bring. If they've truly completed Trinity, we're dead."

She pointed through the windshield. "There's Caryville. And I-75. Are we going north or south?"

"Pull over."

She slowed gradually, then turned the wheel and stopped on the shoulder, just short of the northbound on-ramp.