The Mother Code Read online

  The Gen3 units’ every action had been monitored via remote cameras, reams of data collected. As the team had held their collective breath, twelve of the fifteen Gen3 fetuses had survived the drainage process. The newborns, five boys and seven girls, had been whisked to Fort Detrick via military jet, leaving James to explain their fate. “Thanks so much for all of your hard work,” he’d announced. “Our experiment to simulate the extraterrestrial birth of human children has shown success. And now, some very lucky couples right here on earth will be blessed with new babies.”

  It wasn’t a lie—though there was much he wasn’t telling them. With any luck, the Gen3 babies would be the first of a new breed of children, capable of withstanding the onslaught of IC-NAN. The couples who would care for them, their biological mothers and fathers, were carefully screened military volunteers who’d given up trying to have children of their own after years without success. They’d agreed to periodic monitoring of their children after birth. But the parents would know nothing of New Dawn. And if the necessity arose, if the IC-NAN epidemic truly took hold and the parents died as a result, their children would be adopted by the people whom Rudy referred to as the “chosen few,” those allowed access to the antidote.

  James needn’t have worried about the ethics of the program: In the end, Gen3 was not a success at all. Though seemingly healthy at birth, and though they’d all tested as immune to IC-NAN, the Gen3 babies had rapidly lost vitality. Within two weeks all were dead, and all due to the same cause—multiple organ failure, an accelerated wasting of the tissues. The parents were told only that the experiment had been a failure. And James’s only solace was that they’d never been given a chance to see their babies.

  Now, he needed desperately to keep his Los Alamos team on track. To keep them from noticing the incessant drumbeat of reports coming out of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, even India—of mysterious, inexplicable deaths. “On the news feed, they said it’s some sort of cancer epidemic,” he’d heard one of the techs saying in the cafeteria. “But there’s no such thing . . . Is there?” James needed a way to shield them from all of this, to keep them focused on this project alone—a project whose import only he could know.

  But it was hard. To have any hope of moving forward, he and Rudy would need to answer the question of what had happened to the Gen3 babies. He might have the answer . . . but then again he might not. He closed his eyes. Until Rudy called, it was best to think about something else. He sank into a lab chair, his thoughts drifting to Sara Khoti.

  Sara . . . When he’d arrived here to discover her working just across the hall, he’d thought about fate. They shared a history, he a postdoc at Berkeley, she a doctoral student in mechanical engineering, finishing out her requirements in the human physiology study section he was teaching. He remembered her then, bright-eyed, fresh, eager, with all the promise of the accomplished engineer she now was. He remembered himself—too young, too inexperienced, intimidated by her beauty.

  He should have made his move, so long ago. But by the time Sara was no longer his student, by the time he at last felt free to ask her out, she’d already accepted a postdoc in the robotics department at Caltech. He remembered wishing her well, watching as she left him, her graduation gown swaying in the breeze. They’d promised to keep in touch, but he’d never made the effort. He was every bit as guilty as she for their drifting apart.

  He couldn’t help but consider the irony. Had he made a different choice back then, had he chosen to pursue Sara rather than his career, it could have changed his life in ways unimaginable at the time. Had he wound up a married man, DOD would never have tapped him. He and Sara would have shared the happy ignorance that now only she possessed.

  Now, established in her career, Sara was ready for a relationship; her every action since their reunion had made that clear enough. Their quiet dinners together, listening to old Bollywood music, enjoying the prodigious collection of classic movies that she’d amassed—these were among the few things that had made his life bearable since he’d arrived here. But he couldn’t allow intimacy, a condition that demanded the telling of untellable secrets. If it all went down . . . he knew she wouldn’t get the antidote. People like Blevins had the power to bring those they loved under the umbrella of security. They had choices. But he didn’t. He couldn’t risk falling in love with Sara, only to watch her die.

  So why was he seeing her? Why was he accepting her invitations, spending late nights in her small apartment, remembering those old times—pretending? He winced, thinking how close he’d come to telling her last night. Lying awkwardly on her couch, their bodies moving together, his lips locked on hers to ensure a mutual silence . . . Afterward, he’d hated himself for it.

  “Still staring at that image?”

  “Wh—?” Turning toward the door, James could sense Sara’s light scent even before he caught sight of her.

  “Sorry for sneaking up on you like that,” Sara said. “I was working late. I wondered if you’d like to get some dinner. There’s a new South Indian restaurant in White Rock that stays open late . . .”

  James checked his watch. Nine p.m. “Dinner . . . Sorry, not tonight. Something’s come up.”

  Sara frowned. “Nothing bad, I hope?”

  “Bad? Um . . . Not so bad we can’t recover . . .”

  He watched her face, her eyes taking stock of him. “James, about last night . . .”

  “I’m sorry, Sara. I don’t know what came over me—”

  “You don’t need to apologize . . .” As Sara looked down to study the slim fingers of her right hand, James again caught a whiff of her hair, the scent of lavender. “I happen to like what came over you.”

  “We should slow down . . .”

  But Sara only smiled. “Come, you can take a break. At least let me show you what I’ve accomplished today.” She turned. And as though tugged by an invisible tether, he followed her out into the hall, then through the double doors into the massive robotics bay.

  They skirted the huddle of fifteen Gen4 life support units, still undergoing diagnostic testing at the center of the bay. Gen4, a more integrated repeat of the Gen3 experiment, was designed to manage the entire development cycle from embryo to fetus, from fetus to birth. Like the Gen3 units, their stationary, boxy chassis were formidable, meant to withstand harsh winds and extreme temperatures. And as with the Gen3s, the plan was for the team to closely monitor the development and birth of the Gen4 charges. But unbeknownst to the rest of the XO-Bot team, the biological parents in this case were anonymous, their sperm and eggs banked from chosen subjects who would never learn of their existence. It was understood that only those with current clearance might be alive to care for the babies. The time for considering other options had passed.

  James clenched his fists. There was something else the others didn’t know about Gen4—that the program was stalled until the Gen3 problem had been solved.

  As they made their way toward Sara’s worktable at the far corner of the bay, James’s gaze drifted toward a much different line of bots, looming in the dark along the wall—the Gen5s. To him, the Gen5s were the concrete representation of failure, the doomsday alternative—robotic mothers with enough functionality and autonomy to take the place of human parents. The embodiment of an admission: that no one currently alive would emerge from IC-NAN’s deadly grasp.

  Unlike the previous generations, the Gen5s were no mere machines. They were biobots, replicas of the “supersoldiers” he’d read about as a kid—shells affording real men and women the strength of ten. There were fifty of them—this large number to be deployed based on the expected probability of attrition in the field. Approaching one of the silent machines, he looked up to search her shoulder for a glimpse of her folded wing. Each bot had a pair of retractable wings and a pair of ducted fans, allowing short takeoff flight directed by an onboard computer. Power—enough to last far longer than a human lifetime—was supplied via
a small nuclear source housed in the rear of each bot, encased in a layer of iridium and embedded in graphite blocks.

  The crews who’d assembled the Gen5s had taken to calling them “the Mothers.” Although James sometimes wondered if the term was used tongue in cheek, he had to admit that the bots looked fit for the task. Their aft holds housed the small laboratory where birth would take place, and their hollow forebellies were outfitted to ensconce a small human in a seated position. In addition to a powerful pair of articulated arms and legs, each bot was equipped with heavy treads, built-in elements of the lower legs. When she hunkered down as though on her knees, her treads allowed her to trundle slowly but stably over rough terrain. As he scanned the Mothers, now kneeling in orderly rows, James imagined them beckoning their children . . .

  But they would never be that. A robot could never be a substitute for a human parent.

  Once, the technological singularity had been deemed a certainty; there would come a time when humans would create thinking machines more intelligent than they. These machines would create other machines still more brilliant than themselves, and this nonbiological intelligence would increase at a rate and in ways incomprehensible to the human mind. Humans had a choice, it was said: either merge with technology or be buried by it. But things had happened along the way. The hyperautomated, hyperintelligent military robots built by the Israelis to fight the Water Wars had offered an insight into an apocalyptic future that no one wanted to see fulfilled. Their near-autonomous “supersoldiers” had been inactivated. The Tenth Congress on Artificial Intelligence had set strict limits on further development of computers capable of making decisions independent of human intervention, and the Office of Cybersecurity in Washington had taken on the job of enforcing these regulations in the U.S. An entire industry had been born, companies developing technologies designed to rein in what the press called the “new existential threat” of nonbiological intelligence. And as far as James knew, the New Dawn Gen5 bots had been designed to these prohibitive specifications. For such bots, any truly “human” interaction with a child would seem impossible.

  “Amazing, aren’t they?” Sara said. He turned to see her eyes shaded by a pair of protective goggles.

  “So, they’ve got you working on Gen5 already?”

  “Gens 3 and 4 were simple,” Sara replied. “The Mothers are much more of a challenge.” She turned toward her test bed. “When interacting with their children, the Gen5 bots will require a gentle touch, a precise touch. But to deal with the outside world, they will also require power, strength. We knew we couldn’t create both in one rig. So, we engineered a manifold appendage.”

  “I’ve seen the demo vids . . .” James inspected the robotic hand now mounted on the test bed—a tough, carbon-composite outer shell from which a delicate “secondary” hand emerged. With the shell retracted, the hand, a small black orchid sprouting from the center of a rigid gray glove, could do its work without impediment.

  “Watch this,” Sara said. On her workbench, a set of nimble elastomeric fingers darted over a rack of thin transparent test tubes, selecting one and then drawing it steadily upward. The attached arm moved on to the next step, the fingers still carrying the test tube, the rapid transverse motion not sufficient to break the tenuous contact between them and the smooth sides of the tube.

  “Brava! No failure this time,” James said.

  “We’re using a tackier material. It’s also more compliant.” Beside him, Sara retracted the arm, homing it for yet another pass. “The true innovations in robotics these days aren’t in the programming. We’re still reinventing human motion using a series of configuration parameters and transformation equations that were worked out decades ago. The real advances are in the nanocircuits, the sheer computational capability. In the mechanics too. But mostly in the materials. Self-healing materials, solid materials that change density when touched, materials composed solely of intricate meshes of sensors, bonded together to form massive neural networks.” She turned to face him, her eyes sparkling in the bank of LEDs illuminating the test bed. “We can thank your friend the general for testing them out for us.”

  “Blevins?”

  “Him, and others who are forced to be guinea pigs in the development of new prostheses.” Sara waited until the fingers hovered once more over the rack of tubes, then leaned forward to push “record” on the benchtop console. “I like my robots the way I like my men,” she said, a sly smile stealing over her lips. “Strong, yet gentle.”

  Blushing, James smiled back. He wanted to tell her everything. He wanted to tell her that the delicate hands she’d worked so hard to fashion might one day cradle a newborn, alone on planet Earth. But of course, there was no hope of telling her anything. Not how much he cared for her. Not that he’d allowed himself dreams in which none of this had ever happened—in which he and Sara cradled their own child.

  No . . . He couldn’t allow dreams to stand in the way of the truth. Sara’s project, perfecting the robotic functionality of the Gen4s and Gen5s, was important, yet peripheral. When it came to New Dawn, Sara herself was peripheral.

  “Why do you suppose these biobots are getting so much attention?” Sara asked.

  “Why not?”

  “I mean, it’s fascinating, challenging . . . But neonates on other planets? Aren’t there other, more urgent projects? Where’s the money coming from?”

  James shook his head, clearing his thoughts. He hated lying to her. But he’d memorized the script, and it was his duty to perform his role. “Someone wants this done, and they seem to have plenty of cash,” he said. “It’s paying my bills, anyway . . .”

  “Hmm.” Taking off her goggles, Sara looked at him, those deep brown eyes penetrating his.

  “James?” A familiar voice echoed across the bay.

  Grateful for the interruption, James turned to find Kendra Jenkins approaching at her usual fast clip from the hallway. “Hi, Kendra. What’s up?”

  “Dr. Garza called in to the main line. He says he’s having trouble reaching you?”

  James glanced at his wrist phone. “Reception’s always bad in here . . .” he said. The reception was indeed spotty in the heavily insulated bay. But in any event it was protocol—he couldn’t take the call when anyone without clearance was within earshot. As he turned back toward the hall, he caught Sara’s profile, the faint working of her jaw muscles as her gaze drifted back to the delicate Gen5 hands.

  He trailed Kendra to the computer lab, doing his best to keep up. While black administrators and professors were commonplace in his department at Emory, a black woman with Kendra’s seniority was a rarity at Los Alamos. But Kendra held her own, her calm authority unflagging amid the daily chaos of her myriad duties.

  “I’m sorry, James,” Kendra murmured, turning to look at him over her shoulder.

  “Sorry? About what?”

  “You know,” Kendra said. “Things. Life—how we aren’t supposed to have one.”

  “I suppose . . .”

  Kendra slowed down to match his pace. “You and I are in this thing because we don’t have anyone,” she said. “But I did, once. A husband, and a son.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Plane crash. Seven years ago.” Pulling open the door marked “Computer Lab,” she turned to him. In the dim light, he could barely make out her compact frame and dark complexion. “My husband was an anthropologist. We used to travel everywhere together. I lost my wedding ring somewhere in Nepal . . . Anyway, when our son was just ten years old, Lamar took him down to Mexico, to a dig at the Mayan sites . . .”

  “Meridian Flight 208?”

  “Yup.” Approaching her desk in the now-empty lab, Kendra flipped on her phone hookup and pressed in a code. “James, you don’t have to take my advice. What do I know? Except . . . we only have one life.” She held up her left wrist, and a heavy copper bracelet inscribed with a repeating geo
metric pattern caught the light from her computer screen. “My son would have been seventeen tomorrow. We would have been celebrating. Instead, this bracelet is all I have left of my family. If I were you, I’d enjoy my life. No one can predict the future.”

  James watched Kendra’s face, the emotion so carefully hidden beneath her efficient exterior. A life with Sara . . . the very thought of it sent a thrill through his veins. But he only grimaced as he turned on the mic. “Rudy?”

  “I called as soon as I could.” Rudy’s voice piped from the console. “Have you found something?”

  “I think C-341 is binding too tightly.”

  “Agreed. The antidote trials in Somalia are not going well either.”

  “Somalia?” James felt a twinge of discomfort deep in his gut—the familiar anger at the invisible wall that separated him from the mainstream back in D.C.

  “Uh . . . yes.” Rudy paused. “We’re running our human trials there.”

  “How come I didn’t know about that?”

  “Eh . . . I thought that you did . . .” Rudy cleared his throat. “In any event, cell death is too rapid. The subjects’ lungs atrophy. As you so astutely warned us, the problem is one of balance.”

  James nodded, if only to himself. “Correct. The transcription factor binding was fine in our cell culture models. But its behavior in vivo is decidedly different.”

  “Do you have any ideas?”

  “We need to focus on modifying the sequence that binds the hydrophobic pocket. I’ve come up with a few ideas that I can ship to you. But I’ll defer to your expertise on the DNA structure side.”

  “Perfecto.”

  “And, Rudy?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s obvious I have no pull . . . but maybe you do. Do you think you could convince them to let us grow Gen4 in the lab? I don’t understand why we’re putting so much emphasis on the machines. Until we’re sure we have the biology right—”