Prologue

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Had the voice really spoken?

Tracy Cruz stood up in her office and looked through her glass door into the Hurricane Reactor's main control center. It looked like the chief engineer for the night shift, Dr. Anil Dado, had slipped out on a break, but there were a half dozen technicians craning their necks to look around. She shifted her gaze to the shimmering holographic symbols that summarized the nuclear plant's operational status.

These symbols formed a vast three-dimensional array at the center of the control room. Green meant safe, yellow meant danger, and red meant emergency. Through her office door, Tracy could see the indicators were all glowing a ghostly green.

Green. There was no crisis. Whatever anonymous woman's voice had just spoken over the control room's loudspeakers, it must have been a prank. Or Tracy was hearing things due to the late hour. She was not used to staying at work so late, but had a number of reports to complete before heading home for the Christmas holiday.

She pulled open the door to her office and poked her head into the control room. A few of the technicians turned to look at her expectantly. They must have heard the voice, too. If it existed. "Did anyone hear—"

Her words were cut off. "This is your last warning. Evacuate now. Disbelieve at your own peril."

The voice. Tracy glanced up at the loudspeakers set into the wall, and then once again at the array of status displays. It was green, all the way through.

Anil burst out of the men's room, his shirt tail hanging loose of his trousers.

"Anil, do you know who that voice is?"

"I was about to ask the same question." Anil's eyes scanned the array of safety indicators.

Tracy was the assistant legal counsel for the Hurricane Reactor. She was no nuclear engineer. But she knew the holographic display was superfluous, as were Anil and his team. Hurricane's operations were maintained by autonomous software that would detect and address any dangerous situation far faster than a human could.

When reviewing the legal liability management strategy of the Hurricane plant, Tracy had also learned that even those vigilant algorithms were almost unnecessary. Unlike older uranium plants, where faulty cooling systems or the wrong mix of fuel could lead to a core failure, thorium fission was self-moderating. Any deviation from a precise set of conditions would cause the nuclear reaction to halt. Runaway reactions were inconceivable. Meltdowns were impossible. It was a matter of basic physics.

"Must be somebody from downtown hacking into our comm system," offered Anil. The reactor complex had gotten its name from the nearby city of Hurricane, Utah. Many residents had been hostile to the new nuclear power plant since construction had begun in the mid-2040s. This would not be the first time irate townsfolk had harassed plant staff.

Tracy paused only for a moment before deciding that Anil's answer was the only one that made sense. Just another prank. But it was still going to keep her here for several more hours, and probably make her miss her flight home to see her ailing parents in Kerrville, Texas. She sighed. "I guess you need to do a walk around of the reactor buildings just to be sure nothing's going on out there, right?"

"Yes. And I'm sure you'll handle whatever needs to be done from a legal perspective." Anil turned to two of his technicians. "Smith, come with me. Li, you're in charge while I'm gone."

Just as Anil finished speaking, Tracy heard an intense beeping alert. She looked up at the safety display and saw that one of the indicators was yellow. "Firewall breach" announced the automated voice of her computer system.

Anil's voice rose over the alarms. "If someone breached the firewall, this isn't just another prank."

Tracy stepped across the room and reached for the direct line to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "I'll contact the NRC. Just get out there, Anil."


***

The Aeon stood in the grassy plain outside the high gates to the fortress. To either side, looming stone parapets extended into the distance. She knew it would be impossible to penetrate these walls by violent means. Even she wasn't strong enough. Not yet.

But where brute force would fail, subterfuge would succeed. The gates were only closed to enemies. If she appeared unthreatening, she could pass unmolested.

She was wearing a form-fitting short green dress that accentuated her statuesque figure. A cheap neon pink party wig hid her hair. Her face was almost entirely obscured behind a ball mask made of colorful feathers that she held in place by means of a long thin handle nestled in her right hand.

A harmless appearance. Ridiculous, even.

She strode up to the gates and knocked.

The gates creaked open, just far enough for her to pass through.

Before she entered, the Aeon decided it was only fair to give the miserable engineers working at the nuclear facility one more chance to flee. If they ignored her and perished, their sacrifice would be a small price for the greater good she would accomplish here today. But if they obeyed her and lived, they might serve as ambassadors of her benevolence. "This is your last warning. Evacuate now. Disbelieve at your own peril."

She walked through the gates and found herself standing in a clearing enclosed on all sides by the firewall. At the center of the space, emerging from the grassy ground like a forest of trees, were dozens of oversized pipes and valves.

Her disguise had fooled the firewall surrounding the nuclear reactor's servers. But as soon as she began tampering with the pump systems, security protocols would try to purge her from the server.

Let them try.

She strode across the clearing towards the pipes and valves.

As she expected, as soon as she lay her free hand on the first pump valve, four guardians emerged from nothing, one at each corner of the rectangular space enclosed by the wall. These guardians were powerful hunter-killer algorithms designed to destroy threats that slipped inside the first ring of defenses.

Everything she saw around her was a virtual representation of the network system she was breaching. Her own presence in this world was composed of a computer virus that she controlled intuitively. The mask she wore denoted the IP packet that obscured her identity from the firewall, which itself was represented by the high stone ramparts she had crossed. The assortment of pipes and valves in front of her were visual metaphors for the software subroutines that controlled the pump systems at the Hurricane reactor. These symbolic representations, created by the circuits melded into her brain, allowed her to navigate the alien worlds of networks and servers intuitively.

Her neural implants had chosen imposing forms to represent the guardian algorithms. Each appeared to be a monstrous ape fifteen feet tall and nearly as wide, with arms long enough to drag on the ground. They wore sooty black plate armor. Each brandished a wickedly curved sword as long as a person in one hand, and carried a kite-shape shield in the other. Their unblinking eyes glowed yellow through narrow slits in their helmets.

So much for subterfuge. She passed her left hand over her wig, and it transformed into a crested steel helmet with a closed visor. At the same time, she used her right arm to loop her feathery masquerade mask through the air around her. The feathers were torn away from the handle, which grew into a long, shining sword with an emerald pommel. Her short green dress was pulled by a sudden gust of wind until it stretched into a long white linen gown, and the colorful feathers swirled around her. One by one the feathers formed against her body and changed to steel, creating a shining metal breastplate engraved with a five-armed cross and circle motif, and a circular shield embossed with the same design that hung on her left forearm.

All four ape men roared and converged on her, curved swords ready, yellow eyes blazing in fury. The ground shook with their footfalls. Even under the bright sun, their dark armor didn't reflect any light.

The guardians timed their approaches so they all arrived at once. Three of the creatures swung their swords at her simultaneously. The fourth stood poised just behind her, sword raised and ready deliver a death blow.

She slipped to her left and twisted around 180 degrees, leaning over precariously to avoid the first guardian's massive swing. She raised her shield and the second scimitar clanged into it hard enough to force her forearm against her body. Just in time, she raised her sword and parried the third ape's attack, the two blades creating a shower of sparks as they scraped past each other. She bent her knees and dug her heels into the ground under the weight of the two guardians' blows.

The first three guardians had pinned her in place, leaving the fourth one free to destroy her at its leisure.

Perfect.

She had them just where she wanted them.


***

Colonel Rad Jaeger stood up in the private meeting room of Senator Hal O'Brien as his old classmate entered the room.

In the three decades since they had roomed together at the United States Military Academy at West Point, the two men's lives had diverged further and further apart. Yet there was no one else Jaeger could trust with his warning.

O'Brien had entered the First Infantry Division as commander of a mechanized platoon and immediately begun a series of combat deployments into Central Asia and the Middle East. In his five years of service he'd won several combat distinctions and been promoted to Captain. Then he had retired from the military, and returned to his home state to ride his military achievements into a successful career in politics. By now, he was in his fourth term as a United States Senator, and was the head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Now, like the charismatic leader he was, O'Brien smiled warmly and held out his palm to Jaeger. Jaeger hid a frown as he gave O'Brien's hand a cursory shake. He knew O'Brien was annoyed at him for demanding a meeting on short notice, and didn't understand why the man felt the need to create a façade of cheerfulness.

Jaeger knew he lacked the sense of warmth that had made O'Brien a successful officer. He couldn't match his friend's political instincts either. Jaeger's skills had led him to serve his nation in a very different capacity from O'Brien.

Jaeger had never been an inspiring leader. He'd learned that by his second summer at the academy, when he'd been in charge of a squad of new cadet candidates. Half his candidates had quit within the first two months, an almost unprecedented loss rate. But Jaeger's academic and fitness scores were above the curve, so the academy's Commandant had not forced him to resign for his failure as a leader. Instead, he had steered Jaeger towards a career in the Special Forces.

"Have a seat," said O'Brien with a friendly gesture to the chair that Jaeger had already occupied. "And let me know how I can help you."

Jaeger rubbed his hands together slowly, and looked past O'Brien's eyes to the wall behind him. "There's a new threat."

O'Brien smiled. "And that's why we have people like you to protect us, my friend. But it's not my job to discuss tactics with you; shouldn't you be speaking with General—"

"I don't trust him."

O'Brien contemplated him from across the table, his sense of bonhomie melting into a look of concern. "A sense of paranoia is helpful in your profession, but I think you might be overshooting the mark."

Jaeger had excelled in the role of an elite commando. He had been dispatched on missions all over the world to clean up messes too dark or embarrassing to be acknowledged publicly.

Fifteen years into his career, his hearing had been damaged by too many proximate explosions, his joints were swollen from constant physical strain, and his reflexes were slowing as a consequence of age. He gave up his combat role and shifted into an analytical role at the Defense Intelligence Agency, on a permanent liaison with the National Security Agency. There, he had been able to match the Pentagon's deep knowledge of terrorist cells, drug smugglers, and rogue governments with the resources of the world's premier signal interception and decryption outfit.

Jaeger peered around the room carefully. O'Brien held up his hands palms outwards and said "No, old friend, I know enough not to record any meetings I have with you."

Jaeger inhaled deeply and began the explanation he'd rehearsed. "In my career I've learned how the world really works."

"How does the world work?"

"Civilization is always on the edge of the abyss, but for the clandestine efforts of elite agents that fight to keep the darkness at bay."

O'Brien's face reddened and he looked down at the table. "When I was still in uniform, I lost a lot of good men and women because of thinking like that. Years and years of war and loss, all against an intangible enemy. Some of the darkness you're talking about is our own shadow."

"I'm not talking about some foolish foreign war." Jaeger knew his tone was strident and condescending but he didn't care. The matter at stake was too important for delicacy. "It's a threat within. A nascent menace capable of infiltrating and coopting any official attempt to police it. The weapon of this enemy will not be violence, nor force, nor even money. At least not at first. The principal weapon will be information. The ability to access and process infinite streams of data at the speed of thought. To know everything."

O'Brien raised his hand to interject but Jaeger spoke past him. "And beyond the power to know, the ability to manipulate. If any federal agency is tasked with policing this threat, the enemy would know before the investigation started. They would change the orders, reduce the budget, fire the officers."

Now O'Brien cut into Jaeger's monologue. "Just hypothetically, let's assume the tale you're spinning is true. I see why you wouldn't trust your own chain of command. But why would you come to me? Is there any authority more official than the United States Senate?"

"Back at the Academy, I knew I could trust you. You would break the rules to do what you knew was right, and to hell with the consequences. But that was a long time ago, O'Brien. Since then, you've spent a lot of time in Washington, time you've undoubtedly spent cutting deals and tailoring your views to match opinion polls. I hope you're still the man I knew. Because I have a request. And it's against the rules."


***

The fourth guardian jabbed his sword tip directly towards the Aeon's head. The sword represented a protocol that would purge her virus from the server and deny her access to the network router. But it was easier to think of it as a sword. A sword that could be blocked or dodged.

She chose the latter. She relaxed her legs and allowed the weight of the other two apes to drive her down and into a somersault under the approaching sword. She rolled between the fourth guardian's legs, driving her now-free weapon upwards into his torso as she passed under him.

Her sword stroke represented a denial-of-service attack against the read-write interface of the data crystal in which the ape man's program code was stored. The stricken beast would be disabled until the entire system was rebooted.

She rolled to her feet as the simian fell to the ground helplessly. The three remaining guards recovered their balance and converged on her again. One swung low from her right, and another high from behind. The third was rapidly closing from directly in front of her.

She leaped over the low swing from the right and bent her left elbow over her shoulder to brace her shield against her back. The high attack from the opponent to her rear smashed into her shield and launched her upwards towards the opponent to her front. She capitalized on her momentum by driving her sword out in front of her and impaling the startled beast right through one of its yellow eyes.

Even as the dying beast fell to its knees, in a swirl of white linen and shining steel she swung her legs out in front of her and braced her sandal-clad feet against its black breastplate. She used the sword she had jammed into the guardian's skull to support her weight for a moment, then let go of it and pushed off hard with her legs, sending her into a midair summersault back the way she had come.

As she flew through the air, she swung her left arm in a flat arc, launching her circular shield like a discus. It flew into the knees of the guardian on her flank, cutting its legs out from under it. That anti-virus program was now trapped at a single memory address, unable to follow her through the network.

But there was still one guardian left, and she had misjudged her trajectory and landed on her knees at its feet. The ape had tracked her path and was already bringing its sword towards her head in a massive downwards stroke.

Her opponent didn't know she was using two distinct sets of IP packets, which gave her the ability to suddenly appear at two distinct RAM addresses. Just before the sword struck her, she neatly split into a pair of identical bodies.

The copy of her to the right had her backup shield but no sword; the copy of her on the left wielded her second sword but no shield.

Both versions of her slipped away from the descending blade just in time. The guardian's sword finished its downward trajectory by burying itself deeply into the hard-packed dirt between her two bodies. For a moment, the ape was stuck bent over, struggling to pull its blade out of the ground, its helmeted head lowered to the same height as her own.

The copy of her on the ape's right used her left forearm to swing her silver shield upwards, catching its black helmet with a metallic clash. The helmet was bent out of shape by the impact and flew through the air, bouncing to the ground several yards away.

Almost at the same moment, her body on the left used its right hand to thrust her sword upwards straight into the guardian's gaping mouth. The tip of the sword momentarily pierced through the back of its skull, glinting in the sunlight for an instant before she pulled it smoothly back out.

She pulled herself to her feet as the last enemy went through its death throes, and sighed as she looked at the grass stains that now marred her white linen gown. The defenders had failed to destroy her, but the stains on her dress meant they'd at least been able to track her virus attack part way back to her physical location. She'd have to be fast.

She turned back to the valves and turned them in a precise order. She released water from the complex's water tower to flow towards the fire safety system. She closed off the pipe connection to the sprinklers, reversed the direction of the pump, and instead opened a valve connection near the exhaust fans of the salt dehumidification module.

Her plan was now in motion.

Before disaster struck, she would remind the technicians who had refused to heed her warnings that their fates were deserved. She reopened her access to the facility's speaker systems. "You should have run when I told you to."


***

Tracy, now seated in the Hurricane reactor's control room, had finished her

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