The Day Gravity Became Irrelevant Read online

  The End

  Although he had been president for slightly over three years, this was his first real crisis with the Secret Service. What surprised him most was the rough handling. He had always assumed that the agents would merely shield him as he was hustled away safely under his own power. But what he had not been expecting was for his protective detail to literally snatch him up off the ground and transport him at a dead run, straight into the waiting express elevator.

  But that was not the end of his surprises: although President Jefferson Phelps had been briefed on the existence of the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or PEOC, he had never actually been down into the bunker. The speed of the plunging elevator was fast enough to achieve half-gravity. With his lunch threatening to escape his esophagus, he tried to regain his composure, or at least pretend to.

  “What’s the situation, Mack?” He used the agent’s first name, his voice cracking slightly as the agents released their grip on him.

  “He is descending rapidly, directly over the White House, roughly three hundred thousand feet in altitude.” Senior Agent in Charge Mulligan reported as the doors slid open. More hustling and the President found himself roughly deposited in the Situation Room

  “What the hell is he doing?” President Phelps asked as he watched data flash across the array of screens that covered the far wall. Every printer in the bunker was churning out document after document. He had no way of knowing it, but the same event was occurring all over the world as the virus forced its content into home computers and government supercomputers alike. Adjusting the reading glasses that perched on his nose, he tried to decipher what he was seeing.

  “These are Iranian Nuclear Council documents, all top secret!” The Commander in Navy dress blues was alarmed.

  “These are Russian…I think?” Phelps mumbled as the Cyrillic characters flashed past.

  “These are all North Korean nerve agent inventories.” Someone else down the line noted as he perused a printout.

  “Sir, these are our enemies’ secrets. All of them…” The technical advisor who managed the bunker turned to the President.

  “That’s good, right?” Phelps asked, uncertain by the looks on their faces.

  “Sir.” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs stepped forward assertively. “If this is what he is showing us, then what is he divulging to our enemies?”

  “Mister President.” The technical specialist cut back into the conversation, “We are showing data-flow in both directions; we’re not the only ones being flooded with classified materials. We believe he is airing our dirty laundry to the whole world, literally posting our deepest, darkest secrets on the internet where anyone can read it. I am showing RedBack servers all across the country being flooded with data. He even cracked Google and spidered the sources to make it accessible to anyone with a computer, then encrypted the backlinks so we can’t find the actual content. It’s fucking brilliant.” The techie was clearly impressed with what he saw happening before them. Petabytes of classified data were flowing freely all over the world and there was nothing they could do to staunch the flow. With almost every computer in the world plugged into an always-on broadband connection, the virus was free to virtually host its content on any hard drive or even in system RAM. The information was everywhere, and not just theirs. The virus had examined their files thoroughly before seeking out their enemies and sharing their data as well.

  Summoning up his most presidential gravitas, he turned to his military advisor.

  “Shoot him down!”

  Nothing more was needed to be said. Within seconds his military henchmen had translated the order into a formal battle plan that would be executed with precision. A simple phone call would in turn scramble a formation of F-22s with a classified payload. Streaking to 38,000 feet, they released their ASAT165 missiles in a massive salvo.

  With the air around them thick with electronic counter measures, the missiles climbed ever higher still as their intelligent warheads guided them to the only target they could see. There, thousands of feet above, the object plunged towards them from high in the thermosphere. Closer and closer they drew until their proximity detectors told them they were within detonation range of their target. In a flash of light that was plainly visible to anyone in Washington DC, the capsule detonated like a distant supernova. From that altitude it took several minutes for the wreckage to plunge earthward as it trailed flames and plasma before finally coming to rest in the waters of the Washington Memorial.

  Bent and burnt, the capsule laid steaming in the water. The wreck had come to rest not fifty yards from a group of camera-snapping tourists who recorded every detail of the event. Within seconds it was being shared thousands of times across the internet.

  But the real frenzy began as people realized it was raining money. Like a cloud of butterflies, the sky was filled with millions of charred Benjamins that fluttered down onto the city below.

  Knowing there could be no denial of the events, President Phelps and his spin doctors wasted no time in ensuring that the world knew exactly what had happened. At a press conference set up within sight of the crash site, the leader of the free world leaned on his fists and looked the American people directly in the eye before beginning.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, citizens of the United States of America, today our brave military forces have thwarted an adversary who threatened our very way of life. These men were terrorists who infiltrated our security systems, compromised years of intelligence gathering, then went on to present a clear and present danger to the entire District of Columbia, as well as an even greater threat to the United States and her proud citizens. I am relieved to tell you that these men, brothers Jack and James Sparks, are confirmed dead at this time.”

  The Beginning

  The Sparks brothers could not have been any more dissimilar if they had been from different planets. Although they had once shared a womb, the similarities ended there for the fraternal twins. It had always been something that defied logic. After all, they had been raised by the same parents, in the same home, under the same Italian-African-American hybrid social culture, even schooled in the same institutions. Nonetheless, they were as dissimilar as Europa and Io.

  Born the product of an Irish-Italian father, and a mother of African descent, Jack had never really identified with either racial group. By his thinking, true Americans were mutts; something that his mixed ethnicity truly epitomized. It had always seemed illogical to him to use antiquated terms such as African-American or Italian-American. Having been born a citizen of the most powerful nation in the history of the world, it seemed to him more important that you were American first, then whatever your ancestors had hailed from. Hence, he preferred to think of himself as an American of African-Italian-Irish descent. After all, in America, everyone’s ancestors were from somewhere else.

  Named after his grandfather, Jack had been the first born, only minutes ahead of his younger brother. Like most boys, Jack Edmund Sparks had captured his share of lizards, skinned his knees while jumping his bicycle over the gorge next door, and even pulled the neighbor girl’s pigtails a few times. By no means a simpleton; he had joined Mensa when he was fifteen, graduated from high school when he was sixteen, and completed his master’s degree in electromechanical engineering by the age of twenty. While most of his peers had considered the curriculum at MIT to be challenging, Jack had sailed through despite spending most of his nights either drinking at frat parties, or chasing skirts on campus. Like any red-blooded American college man, he had enjoyed his time at university, sucking the marrow out of life’s bones during his brief tenure.

  But even from the start things had been different with Jamie.
Where other babies had cried incessantly until their parents figured out what ailed them, the youngest of the Sparks boys had learned early on that simply holding his hands up to his face as if he were sucking on a bottle would result in his being fed. Squirming his buttocks told his parents that he needed changing, and grasping fingertips meant that he wanted to be held. Speaking in complete sentences by the age of 2, he set his next milestone a year later when he learned to read by watching the closed captioned text on TV.

  He was barely 4 the first time he spoke in a foreign accent. At the time it had just been written off as something he picked up from TV. Besides, it was cute to have a child genius with a British accent. However, they were much less thrilled with his hillbilly persona; little country Jimmy was known to be quite profane.

  While other children in daycare stacked blocks or played in mud puddles, Jamie was usually found with his face in an encyclopedia. Once he had digested the entire vintage set of Britannica encyclopedias that lined the shelf, he moved on to technical manuals, college textbooks, and readily digested Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time. While this rate of progress initially thrilled his parents, by the age of 7 it had turned problematic.

  Although James and Sandra Sparks, academics themselves, delighted in the idea of a child savant in the house, the reality of such a progeny soon taught them that it was not all it was cracked up to be. Far too smart to join the other first graders in his class, and already brighter than the teacher herself, there were problems right away. After a specialist was brought in to evaluate the boy, the determination was quickly made that with his quantum rate of advancement, public school was not the place for Jamie. Unfortunately, they received the same advice from all three of the nearby private schools. At that point their only other alternative would have been to enroll an 8 year old as a college freshman.

  Not comfortable with her child being submerged in a classroom with students more than a decade older than her little boy, Sandra had finally given up and taken a sabbatical from her position as a tenured professor. It had seemed simple enough at the beginning; after all, she was an experienced educator, how hard could it be? Usually she taught to hundreds of students at once, so one single student should be a snap. Right?

  The first few years had been challenging as her son soared through increasingly more difficult material. She had her first real inkling of what lay ahead the morning she found him editing her graduate thesis after finding it in a desk drawer. It had shocked her, the sheer amount of red ink the twelve-year-old had expended on the masterpiece she had spent three years compiling. It boggled her mind to realize that already his intellect had soared to the degree that he could so easily quantify truths of the universe that she still struggled to fathom. How do you keep up with an intellect like that? It befuddled the mother to think that even after more than twenty years of education, and another decade as an experienced educator, she was dangerously close to having nothing left for the boy. Already he did their taxes better than TurboTax, and graded physics papers faster than graduate students.

  Despite the difficulties, James and Sandra Sparks traded off the workload of educating their son. It was simply more than one person could do alone. Like a quantum singularity, the little boy could digest anything in his path. Sandra had likened it to feeding a locomotive. Unfortunately, if they failed to keep Jamie Junior’s fires stoked with new knowledge, he tended to turn his attention to other things. After he convinced Jack to help him build a particle accelerator out of the family microwave, they knew something had to be done with the boy.

  But the straw that broke the camel’s back came when Sandra’s own alma mater accused him of cheating during his equivalency testing. Although little Jamie had indeed attended college for almost an entire semester, the experiment came to a screeching halt after his professors united in protest. While the professional educators pointed to Jamie’s unique personalities as the source of the problem, in reality they simply did not like having their errors pointed out by a fourteen year old child.

  But in truth, Jamie’s episodes had been increasing. Where he had once only slipped into his characters intermittently, he now tended to loiter there, sometimes for hours. It had become a concern for James and Sandra. More and more of his interpersonal communication seemed to be through these characters…these avatars. While Sandra realized fully that this was just how her son’s beautiful mind chose to communicate, in a formal classroom environment his conduct was just too disruptive.

  With no teacher willing to host the child in their classroom, Jamie had been forced to complete equivalency testing to obtain his degrees. After an exhaustive battery of exams in every discipline, the academic staff was shocked at the results. Convinced that he must have duped the test somehow, the University had demanded that his intelligence quotient be tested.

  But the results had been off of any recognizable chart. The Stanford-Binet test used by the university was designed to measure an IQ up to 160. Jamie had not only achieved the maximum possible test score, but done it in half the time of anyone who had ever taken the test. For reasons beyond explanation, the university had refused to ratify the results. While simultaneously denying his requests for graduation, the college chose instead to ask him in blunt terms to leave their campus and never return.

  Although the matter had upset James and Sandra considerably, it had been an insignificant event to little Jamie. After all, he had felt stifled by the plodding pace of college. Finally released from his educational bindings he was now free to study at his own pace. With a broadband internet connection, and an Amazon account, the young man was able to pore through volumes of data.

  It was at the age of eighteen that Jamie first began to change his own paradigm. Having absorbed the equivalent of eight doctorates, he was no longer satisfied with just learning. The epiphany had come about after a morning of being irritated with the speed of his personal computer. Though it was rated as one of the fastest on the market, the silicon masterpiece seemed to take forever to load and process large volumes of data. As his subconscious brain analyzed the parameters of hyperthreading with an 18 core processor, it occurred to him that there was a better way.

  And thus was born his first invention: the Cubed Processor. Cobbling together components from more than a dozen motherboards, he had assembled a CPU that was a 128x128x128 matrix, or 1283. Using virtualization to double the size of the existing 64 bit processors had only been the first step in creating a central processor that was 128 bits wide, 128 bits tall, and 128 bits deep. Running at nearly 4,000hz, the Cubed Processor had the ability to process more than 8 billion bits of data with each tick of the electronic clock. While conventional hyperthreading allowed the operating system to dedicate individual CPUs to each major process, Jamie’s system allowed him to dedicate entire floors to an application. With each layer of the cube possessing the computational power of 1282x3900hz, even a single floor was several magnitudes more powerful than the best mainframes on the market. Additionally, he found that unused floors could double as processor cache; the ability to park data for processing within the CPU itself meant that there was no longer even a RAM transfer delay. In essence, the Cubed Processor could outstrip all but the best super-computers on the planet. The truly amazing thing was that he had done it all on the cheap by buying up last-gen processors at bargain prices.

  His next problem was the operating system itself. Needless to say, Windows and Linux were completely incapable of handling this kind of raw power; and thus he found himself writing his own OS. Originally named Babbage in honor of one of the earliest leaders in computer science, the mass of code performed admirably enough. Still, it was really little more than a digitalized version of Charles Babbage’s mechanical computer. Inputs dictated actions that created outputs. Every action stimulated a predictable result consistently. While most people would have been satisfied to have created not only the world’s fastest computer but an entire operating system, Jamie was decidedly not. In his eyes the OS was du
mb. It was little different than using wheels, levers, and pulleys to calculate. In his imagination he could actually envision a crude steam engine driving his simpleton software.

  It was here that he turned to the works of Alan Turing; the theoretical father of artificial intelligence. Having lived and died before the invention of the semiconductor, Turing’s genius had been hindered by the crude computers of his era. But Jamie suffered from no such technological limitations. Moving to the next logical step, he began devoting his every waking minute to the creation of a sentient AI.

  At the age of 20, the brothers suffered their greatest loss in life; the death of James and Sandra Sparks in a tragic car accident. Killed by a drunk driver on their way home from Christmas shopping, the event had been particularly difficult for Jamie. Although Jack had dozens of friends, the studious Jamie really only had his family. While his brain could uncover the secrets of the universe as easily as most people peeled a tangerine, the young savant had always found his own species to be a mystery. Even after spending months trying to dissect social conduct, he found that most of it was illogical. He simply could not understand why people would find small talk anything but boring.

  Finding his world reduced to just he and his brother, Jamie had no idea how to process the gaping hole in his life. While he would have logically turned to his brother, Jack’s own reaction to the tragedy was to clam up at the mention of his parents. Like anyone faced with a senseless loss, the elder Sparks brother felt a great sense of bitterness every time he thought about the drunk who had killed his parents. Charged with felony DUI, it was the man’s third conviction. It galled Jack to know that when the felon was finally freed from prison in a decade, their parents would still be dead. Rather than revealing his feelings on the topic to his brother, Jack simply closed up tight as a vault, often becoming hostile at the mere mention of the day their lives had changed.