He wonders if that is true, if he could have—should have—done more from a distance than use the government’s secret kill switch to disable the engines of the four SUVs, more than turn the bad boys’ smartphones into Macarena locators that revealed them to Nina and prevented them from coordinating their search for her. A smartphone is a handheld computer. Hackable. If he can tap Spotify to stream whatever music he wants to their phones, amp up the volume of the speakers, and magnify the vibrator function, perhaps there is some way to feed a charge to a phone’s lithium battery that will rapidly overload it and cause it not merely to grow very hot but to explode, injuring whoever is carrying it. If that might be the case, he lacks the genius to see how it can be done.
Those who have long predicted the Singularity have imagined that the physical integration of man and machine will lead to all manner of amazing powers, as well as to a radical enhancement of the human intellect, making human beings hundreds or thousands—or even millions—of times smarter than they currently are. The expectation of amazing powers seems to a limited extent confirmed, but Michael can testify that the übergenius theory is less science than wishful thinking, comic-book thinking. He’s still processing events with the same slightly better than average brain that has gotten him through forty-four years of life and a day or so of death.
Perhaps his reflexes are better, even markedly better than they were when he was twenty, because in spite of the rain and the road condition, he’s finessing the Bentley through traffic that’s for the most part doing between sixty and seventy miles an hour, while he stays between eighty and a hundred. He doesn’t need the navigation system that Woodbine left switched off. He knows where he’s going, having entered Nina’s phone and confirmed the location of her GPS signal.
He isn’t expecting a highway patrol car to be parked along the shoulder, radar cone exposed to the rain. On a night when there will be three times as many accidents as usual because of the weather, the police avoid further distracting motorists by declining to give chase to the most egregious scofflaws among them. Indeed, it’s not a radar trap that puts him at risk. After racing around an eighteen-wheeler at ninety miles an hour, he sweeps past a CHP black-and-white, a Dodge Charger, that’s cruising twenty yards ahead of the big truck. Cutting speed now is pointless. He’s already barreling away from the patrol car, already clocked, when the lightbar on its roof brightens and its siren sounds.
He isn’t constantly aware of the infinitude of electromagnetic-wave streams that carry data around and through him, doesn’t see, hear, smell, taste, or feel them in the usual sense. The powerful nanotechnology that was conveyed into every cell of his brain and body by the archaea provides him with a sixth sense that’s difficult to comprehend in human terms. His sixth sense is like a second self. That cybernetic persona, his shadow self, is continuously alert to all frequencies, capable of identifying the systems using them for transmission and instantly “reading” the content. The billions of cells that constitute Michael also compose the most sophisticated transmitter and receiver of data in the world. He contains billions of conventional tuning capacitors paralleled by small variable capacitors, which allows his shadow self to scan the entire spectrum of frequencies and fine-tune to precisely the one he desires at any moment. He is not actively aware of this shadow self until he seeks its service. Then he needs only to think what data stream he wishes to enter, at which point he can see-hear-understand what information it carries. More important, however, is his capacity to control that data stream and insert instructions into it. That is his primitive understanding of how Michael and Shadow Michael work, which in fact he can no more explain than a five-year-old piano prodigy can explain how, after hearing a sonata by Mozart only once, he’s able to play the piece impeccably and with passion beyond his years.
Although Michael needs merely to think what he wants from his shadow self, he usually speaks the request, for a lifetime habit of vocalizing can’t be broken in a few days. Just as Amazon’s Alexa can often translate a slightly inaccurate search request and provide the information needed, so Shadow Michael knows what Michael wants even when his request isn’t a precise description of the subject. After returning to life and ghosting out of Beautification Research, during his days in the Beverly Hills house of Roger Pullman, whose clothes he still wears, his understanding of his strange power had rapidly evolved because it was part of the function of the nanotech shadow self to instruct him with tutorials that unspooled like vivid daydreams.
Now, fleeing with the cruiser in pursuit, he says, “Insert me into California Highway Patrol’s system of in-car computer terminals and digital citation printers. The nearest mobile unit.”
He retains an awareness of the highway ahead of him, as well as a keen recognition of the challenges of the traffic and weather, but another scene appears in the upper right-hand quadrant of his range of vision, rather like a screen in screen on a TV. The inset image is provided by the camera in the computer of the pursuing patrol car. He can see half of the driver’s face—a square jaw, a nose broken more than once, one eye set deep under a formidable brow.
The officer finishes speaking into the microphone of the police radio, and a dispatcher begins to answer him, but Michael shuts down that avenue of communication. He has control of the patrol car’s computer and equipment associated with it. He douses the flashing lightbar on the roof. Kills the siren. He switches on the outside speaker by which the officer can blast instructions at motorists, cranks it up to the max, pulls a Sirius radio signal out of the air, and feeds “Proud Mary” by Creedence Clearwater Revival through the system at such thunderous volume that he can hear it in the Bentley. The black-and-white loses speed and falls back from him. From the computer, he can slide into the car’s basic electronics, so he pops the trunk-lid release and shuts off the headlights. He turns the heater and fan to the highest setting, giving the patrolman some Mojave Desert in the middle of the downpour that has overwhelmed the windshield wipers, which have been shut off and locked.
In the upper right-hand quadrant of his vision, Michael sees the frantic officer, who’s virtually blinded without headlights and wipers, guiding his disabled vehicle to a stop on the shoulder of the freeway. The cop will have a cell phone to call for assistance, but in this weather and under the circumstances, he probably didn’t get a chance to read the Bentley’s license-plate number. And before Michael exited the squad car, he erased the video recorded by its bow and stern cameras. If the plates are reported to the National Crime Information Center, Michael will receive a blue-neon warning in his mind’s eye and either delete the listing or change some of the numbers around to confound the authorities.
Rain falls, darkness deepens, and Michael races south toward an interstate exit, a lonely state highway, a quiet valley, and a dead orchard, where Nina and her son need the kind of help he can provide only with the AR-15. Earlier he retrieved it from the compartment under the back seat. It’s now wedged barrel up between the passenger seat and the dashboard. One extended magazine with twenty rounds has been inserted in the rifle. The three spares lay on the seat. As a security specialist and licensed bodyguard, he is trained in the use of various firearms, including this one. But he’s never shot anyone. He’s never killed anyone. He is highly skilled with the AR-15, and he knows full well that Aleem and his crew are killers who give nothing to the world but misery and grief. But he has never killed anyone.