Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Read online

  He knew it would be dim-witted and chauvinistic of him to harbor hurt feelings about the incident. But still, his pride was vaguely injured. When John Praxis was growing up, men were supposed to be the strong, protective types, while women were supposed to shriek and cower in moments of danger. That was just the way the world worked. He never expected that, when the knives came out in a street fight, he would be the oblivious partner walking around in a daze, while the lady on his arm would spin around three times and turn into Wonder Woman.

  He didn’t regret that Antigone had saved him, not at all. But still, he felt somehow diminished. The best he could manage was, “Thank you, m’dear, for saving me.”

  She tucked a stray bit of hair past her ear. “You’re welcome, sweetheart.”

  * * *

  On the second anniversary of the Treaty of Louisville, Brandon Praxis flew to Washington to honor the fallen among the troops he had led.

  Because the country’s capital remained in Kansas City, the entire District of Columbia had become a National Heritage Park. Some of the country’s best museums were already located there, including the Smithsonian, the Air and Space, the Museum of Natural History, and the National Art Gallery, and it was considered inappropriate as well as too expensive to move them all to a new setting. Now the public buildings of the former federal government joined them as tourist attractions.

  The White House had become a history center with exhibits on the country’s foreign wars and invasions, from 1812 to Afghanistan. The Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the East Wing was dedicated to the Cold War and Atomic Era, while the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing celebrated the country’s response to the September 11 attacks.

  The U.S. Capitol building became an art gallery, with traveling and rotating exhibits in the hallways, amateur theatricals staged in the House and Senate chambers, and noontime concerts in the Rotunda—although the acoustics were terrible, with a nine-second reverb delay that had to be compensated with arrays of sound-damping loudspeakers.

  Brandon and every other former U.S. soldier understood that the nation would have only one monument to the Second Civil War—the Oval Pool in Oklahoma City, which serially hologrammed the names and images of the Federated Republic’s dead. But Arlington National Cemetery was still intact and functioning, and a section had been set aside for the men and women who had fought and died on the “wrong side” of the war.

  He had bought a wreath, a simple circle of cypress leaves with a cluster of two white roses for his own 2nd Battalion and three red roses for the 3rd Combined Arms Division of which they were a part. No one else would understand the symbolism—except for the two hundred and eighty-three soldiers resting here, lying among comrades from other units, other battles.

  As Brandon approached that section of the cemetery on foot, he recognized a familiar face. Frieda Hammond was wearing a black business suit and carrying a long white flower, perhaps a lily.

  “Hello, Major,” he said quietly.

  “Colonel. You remembered, too.”

  “Of course.”

  They walked down the row of graves, and he laid his wreath on the first name he recognized: SP4 Corporal John J. Sparto, who had died defending his burning tank on the northern bank of the Ohio River. That had been an awful death. Sparto deserved the wreath.

  “So many of them,” Hammond said, “for such a cocked-up war.” She laid her flower on the next grave, Chief Warrant Officer Eugenia Sparrow.

  “I’m sorry,” Brandon said. “I don’t recall exactly what happened to her.”

  “Helicopter crash,” Hammond replied. “During routine transport.”

  “Oh! Do you remember them all? Each death?” he asked.

  “Of course … it was my job,” she replied simply.

  Another thing there would never be, Brandon realized, was a Tomb of the Unknown. With DNA analysis and better recordkeeping, each soldier could now be accounted for. Rumor during the war had said that the only MIAs were soldiers who actually chose to disappear. Brandon doubted that. War offered too many ways to atomize the human body beyond recovery.

  When they reached the end of the row and had run out of names that even Hammond could recognize or remember, she turned to him, gave a sad smile, and saluted.

  “See you next year, Major?” he asked.

  “Probably not. You say good-bye and move on.”

  “That’s the way of it, I guess.”

  * * *

  When John Praxis got back to the office after his vacation—more like a honeymoon—with Antigone, he learned that his daughter had totally changed around the company’s computer system. The installation was so deep and invasive that they finally had to hire an information technology manager to keep everything together and running properly.

  Her name was Penelope Winston, but she introduced herself as “Penny,” and she was young enough to be his granddaughter—maybe even a great-granddaughter. She was pretty enough, in the no-makeup, face-scrubbed, farm-girl fashion, with curly red-brown hair, blue eyes, snub nose, and freckles. She showed up at the Friday lunchtime executive meeting wearing blue jeans, a black tee shirt blazoned with the motto “I can explain it to you but I can’t understand it for you”—which Praxis found vaguely disturbing—a military camouflage jacket, and combat boots. The whole outfit was two notches below San Francisco standard for the old casual Friday, plus it was snarky. This was unfortunate because she was giving a major demonstration of the new system’s capabilities that day.

  She was halfway through her introduction and already hip-deep in a technical language filled with search strategies, heuristic learning types, minimax decision making, constraint propagation, and core resources when Praxis put up a hand to interrupt the flow. “Excuse me,” he said. “Could you start over, for the slow children in the room?”

  Antigone, sitting immediately to his right, caught his eye and grinned.

  Callie, across the table, leaned back in her chair and looked troubled.

  “Yes, sir,” Winston replied. “What is it you need to know?”

  “Tell me, in simple terms, what this thing does that we didn’t do before.”

  “Well …” The young woman frowned. “It pays attention. It’s basically an artificial intelligence, although we don’t use that word anymore. It will help coordinate your business and govern your recordkeeping functions like accounting, finance, personnel, and project scheduling—the backroom stuff.”

  “Does it replace the operating system, accounting package, and whatnot?”

  “Oh, no! It’s an overlay to the system. It doesn’t replace anything. It augments and monitors. Think of it like having a real-time operator who watches everything and asks the right questions.”

  “Does it talk?” Praxis asked. “Don’t artificial intelligences speak English?”

  “It’s merely an analytical engine,” Winston said. “But, but if you want, I suppose we could put in a synthesizer and teach it English. We’d need a separate port for that, too.”

  “Then could it attend our board meetings and make its own reports?” The possibility of having a robot system large enough, smart enough, complex enough to run a whole company intrigued him—even though he had been stung by one when he worked for the plumbing company. “Does it have a name? Do we call it ‘Hal’?”

  “Well, sir, it has an IQ about equal to a dog’s,” she replied. “A really smart dog, a working dog, like a border collie—and with the same kind of fixed focus and attention span. But it won’t converse like a human being. And it doesn’t play chess or do psych evaluations.”

  “Then we’ll call it ‘Spot,’ ” he said. “Or ‘Rover.’ ”

  Penny Winston looked over at his daughter Callie for help.

  “It’s just a machine, Dad,” she said. “It simply follows rules, or algorithms, that refer to an extensive database of prior examples—something like a person drawing on vast experience. But it doesn’t actually think—although it can learn and
add to that base of experience.”

  “Do you trust it?” he asked her seriously.

  “More than some people I can name,” she said.

  “Until it does something terribly wrong, I suppose.”

  * * *

  Antigone Wells had come to treasure the weekly trysts with John. It was usually on a Saturday morning, but sometimes Sunday, when the two of them went out for lunch together as a couple—just them, without Callie, her daughter, other family members, or PE&C associates, and no business talk allowed. This particular morning they had gone to Café de Young, attached to the art museum in Golden Gate Park, and after the meal they walked it off by touring the galleries. They were holding hands like a pair of teenagers—until they came to one piece in the exhibit hall of American sculpture.

  Wells felt John’s hand leave hers as he stopped in front of a standing, larger than life marble figure of a woman. She was naked except for a sheet clutched around her waist. At first, Wells thought he was captivated by the coldly erect stone breasts, which was what you would expect from a man. Wells dismissed them as less than impressive.

  “What a face!” John whispered. “Such a load of anger!”

  Antigone Wells came back around and peered up into the face, which was bent slightly forward. It was a stern face, certainly, with eyebrows drawn together and full lips slightly pursed. But rather than anger, Wells read the expression as more consternation, confusion, or dawning realization. She looked down and, between the figure’s sandaled feet, saw locks of hair and an old-fashioned straight razor that was cocked open. The title of the work, carved into the base, was “Delilah.”

  “Have you dealt with many angry women?” she asked. Now that Wells thought of it, the figure with its long hair and hint of darkness, even on the creamy marble, reminded her of his daughter Callista.

  “Adele could have that look sometimes,” John said. “I often thought it was directed at me.”

  That was his wife, the woman who died. A drunk, as Wells remembered from their consultation long ago about having her committed.

  “I don’t know what she had to be angry about,” Antigone Wells said now in John’s defense. “She had a good life, didn’t she? Married to a successful man. Three talented and successful children. Big house in the smartest neighborhood—”

  “We made a lot of sacrifices to get there. I think she would have settled for less.”

  “Most women do,” Wells said sadly.

  “But not you,” he said, taking her hand.

  She pulled the hand free. “You don’t know what I’ve had to give up, either!”

  With that, she walked away. Wells would let him come after her—or not.

  But his footsteps followed quickly, and he called to her softly, “Tig!”

  She turned into his arms. “All right. You get to keep your hair.”

  Then she waited three beats before adding, “This time.”

  * * *

  Brandon Praxis had been called to a meeting in the corporate headquarters by someone he’d never heard of, a woman named Penelope Winston, “of the IT Department.” He didn’t recall PE&C ever having one, but he took it as a sign that the company was growing and expanding.

  When he arrived on the third floor, his aunt saw him in the long hallway, gave him a funny look, and pointed toward the far end. “She’s waiting for you in the media room,” Callie said.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “We’ve all had to go through it.”

  “Go through what?”

  “You’ll see.”

  In the conference room he found a young woman in her mid-twenties or maybe even younger, dressed rough in patched jeans and a tee shirt that said, “Forget the Clowns, Send in the Engineers.” But she was really cute, with tousled hair and big, bright eyes. She looked him up and down and gave him a grin.

  Suddenly he was aware of his own clothes: khaki work shirt with button-down pockets and shoulder straps, tactical pants with side pockets, and steel-toed boots. He didn’t look much different from any working engineer called in from a job in the field, except for the M9 bayonet in a sheath on his right hip and the ammo magazines in those extra pockets.

  “You must be the soldier,” she said. “I’m Penny Winston, your new in-house tech wizard.” She held out her right hand without getting up from her chair.

  He was already moving to sit on the opposite side of the black-glass conference table but changed direction and leaned over to shake hands. She used his change of momentum, just like a judo throw, to pull him around and steer his butt into the chair beside hers.

  “More comfy this way,” she said.

  She tapped on the tabletop, invoking touch-sensitive symbols he couldn’t read because of the angle, and a window opened in the webwall across from them. Rather than the Skyped face of another person, it showed a blank screen with a blinking cursor, like an old-fashioned text application. He didn’t recognize any of the pictograms and pulldowns across the top of its frame.

  “Hello, Rover,” Penny said to the room.

  The screen stayed blank for a moment.

  Then it typed, “H … ello, Winston!”

  “Who’s Rover?” Brandon asked.

  “That’s what Mr. Praxis insists on calling your new software support system,” Penny said, waving at the wall.

  At the same time, the screen cursor did a line return and typed, “I am Rover. Who are you?”

  “This is Brandon Praxis,” she answered for him.

  The screen did another line return, gave that unnerving pause, then spilled out a paragraph of facts including his full name, position in the company, pay grade, New Social Security Number, home address—an apartment in a South of Market high-rise—three contact numbers with the proper descriptives, and curiously enough, his blood type, O-negative. It finished with “Grandson of John Praxis. Nephew of Callista Praxis. Former U.S. Army officer, official rank of captain at demobilization. Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star, campaign ribbons for Memphis, Louisville, Pine Barrens, Atlanta. Honorable discharge but without veteran status or pension benefits.” Then it stopped, did another line return, and waited with blinking cursor.

  He stared at the screen. “That’s a neat party trick.”

  Penny tapped the table again, and the cursor turned into a square—the universal “offline” symbol. “Rover is here to correlate and compare data, to help run the company,” she said.

  “It’s an intelligence,” Brandon supplied with a grimace. They’d had problems with those in the service. It turned out that, in the field, under pressure, “almost genius” could be the same thing as “amazingly stupid.”

  “Think of it as a failsafe,” she replied. “Rover has already made three passes through all the company accounts and discovered a number of anomalies.” She tapped the tabletop again, and the cursor changed. “Tell us what you found in the Security Department,” she said to the screen.

  The cursor blinked thoughtfully, then asked, “What is at 255 … 51 Industrial Boulevard in Hayward in California?”

  Brandon knew full well what that facility did, because he’d set it up personally. The address was in a warehouse district just north of Interstate 92 with a short and relatively uncomplicated storm drain leading out to San Francisco Bay. He was naturally hesitant to describe what actually went on there—not to an unknown cyber system, and certainly not to the pretty girl with the blue eyes sitting next to him.

  “It’s basically … well, a training facility,” he said. “For my security officers.”

  The cursor blinked at him. “Sixty-five square meters is small for training.”

  “It supplements our main facility in Menlo Park,” Brandon explained.

  “Personnel office, material storage, and staging,” Rover replied.

  “That’s right. Did you find any more ‘anomalies’?” he asked.

  “Yes, two chemical fume hoods installed at that address.”

  “My officers have to know how to wor
k with CS gas.”

  “Two-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile. Tear gas.”

  “I don’t know. I suppose that’s the formula.”

  “And fourteen drums of perchloric acid.”

  Brandon paused. He wondered if the machine had a camera on him and was smart enough to read body language. Or could it detect stresses in his voice, like a lie detector? He glanced sideways at Penny, and found her looking at him with a gentle, expectant smile. Whatever the Rover software suspected, it hadn’t let her in on the joke yet.

  “We use it for cleaning and etching metals,” he said flatly.

  “As in … removing the serial numbers from weapons?”

  “Something like that.” Brandon shrugged. “Occasionally.”

  “Three thousand liters of acid? … I do not understand.”

  “Well, what do you think we do with it?” he asked in exasperation.

  The cursor winked at him thoughtfully. Then it typed, “Manufacture of ammonium perchlorate. A component of solid rocket fuel.”

  Brandon sighed. “You got me! We manufacture propellant for our rocket grenades and other munitions. It’s not exactly legal without a license, but …” He glanced at Penny.

  She looked like she was chewing on something, trying to smile but still in doubt. She tapped the offline again. “Getting you in trouble is not the purpose here,” she said quietly. “We’re not the cops.”

  “Thank you. But then, what is the purpose?”

  “We’re helping the new system understand what it’s seeing through your accounting, billing, contracts, scheduling, and other operational indices.”

  “I understand. Is there anything else?”

  She unmuted the intelligence long enough to confirm that it had no more questions. Then she tapped again for silence. She turned to face Brandon and stared deep into his eyes. “You know,” she said slowly, “I looked up perchloric acid as soon as Rover flagged the account. It’s a powerful corrosive, way too dangerous for amateurs to handle—especially in manufacturing explosives.”

  “Uh-huh?” Brandon’s face didn’t move. “So … what’s your take on the situation?”