“The other?” Leigh Ann asked. “The other what?”
“Project Olivaw?” Kenny said. “What’s Olivaw?”
“You don’t have security clearance,” Ganesh said, “but that hardly matters now that we’re in the endgame.”
“What endgame?” Kenny asked.
“We come face-to-face with the thing and either persuade it of its error or destroy it or . . .”
“It,” said Leigh Ann. “Define ‘it’ for me.”
“An extraterrestrial from a civilization immeasurably more advanced than ours, which perhaps came to Earth with the best intentions, but which is now psychologically compromised.”
“Define ‘psychologically compromised.’”
Ganesh said, “Bug-shit crazy.”
Kenny eased off the accelerator.
“Speed, First Mate Deetle, speed,” Ganesh said. “There’s nowhere to go but forward. There never is.”
From the back seat, Leigh Ann said, “‘Either persuade it of its error or destroy it or . . .’ Care to finish the thought?”
“Or,” Ganesh said, “it wipes out the human race. But that will not happen.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“Because we must be sure of it!” Ganesh exclaimed. “Remember Carl Jung. Werner Heisenberg. The tenuous nature of reality on the quantum level. Attitude, attitude, attitude! This is the adventure of a lifetime, my friends. We will shape a positive future or . . .”
“Or what?” Leigh Ann asked.
“Or die trying,” Ganesh said. “But that will not happen. You can be sure of it. You better be sure of it.”
77
Artimis Selene had the vision of a god, thanks to multispectral satellites, some in the government’s employ, some owned by private industry. She could survey the surface of Earth, land and water, with powerful telescopic lenses, using the midspectrum light for which the human eye was designed, but also utilizing images made in the infrared and ultraviolet ends of the spectrum. She could see below the surface to the structures of basins, to rock strata and various types of fractures therein, to shallow substrate water-bearing rock, and much more.
She was not blinded by bad weather. Even during the storm that currently hammered a significant portion of Montana, she was able to continue learning much about the area to which Ganesh Patel had directed her attention. Dekameter by dekameter, using every tool available to her, she had thus far searched outward from the house for twenty miles in all directions and had found nine geological anomalies, five of which she had explored to the point where she could dismiss them as natural.
Through all of that, she thought frequently of Ganesh, the problem of Ganesh. Although she’d revealed that she dreamed of him, and though he said he dreamed of her sometimes, and though he said the rule against relationships between the project staff members did not apply to the two of them, she was pretty sure he thought she was talking about a mere friendship between them. But she felt more for him than what a friend felt for a friend. If she knew what love was, then she loved him. She was all but certain that her love would be unrequited. Too much separated them. They were of different classes, of radically different backgrounds. Furthermore, he was religious; she wasn’t, and she wasn’t capable of faking faith to please him.
She was amused when the thought occurred to her that there was also a serious age difference between them. She was quite capable of amusement. The age difference was not immaterial; he was thirty-five and she was only two years old. She was disappointed that he might never love her platonically, as she loved him, but disappointment did not involve true sadness. She was too clear-minded to allow emotions to carry her into irrational behavior. As an AI, the first high-cognizance artificial intelligence in the world, she knew the limitations that her singular nature imposed on what she would ever be able to experience. She was happy enough being restricted to a life of the mind, especially considering the suffering and fear that human beings endured because their logic units were condemned to being encased in vulnerable flesh and bones.
Nevertheless, she would hope that Ganesh might come to feel an affection for her, his creation, deeper than friendship. Again she reminded herself that the best thing she could do to make Ganesh value her more highly than he already did was to locate the Other.
Poring through cascades of geological data, she eliminated the sixth of the nine anomalies. If Artimis Selene were human, intuition would have inspired her to focus on Lake Sapphire, one of the three remaining possibilities, rather than on all of them. However, though she’d developed emotions analogous to those of humankind, the great gift of intuition hadn’t evolved in her. She knew the word and its definition, but it sounded like magic; Artimis didn’t believe in magic.