Obey or Die

Prologue

When Scientific American published MIT Professor Marvin Minsky’s prescient view that man would eventually evolve into machines, the scientific world chalked it up to Minsky’s legendary overactive imagination. Perhaps Minsky was a prisoner of his own dreams, but there was a time that he gave us a glimpse into the future. Professor Minsky, the first Chairman of the Computer Science Department at prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Father of Artificial Intelligence was light years ahead of the rest of the scientific community, when he penned:

…The more we learn about our brains, the more ways we will find to improve them. Each brain has hundreds of specialized regions. We know only a little about what each one does—but as soon as we find out how any one part works, researchers will try to devise ways to extend that organ’s capacity. They will also conceive of entirely new abilities that biology has never provided. As these inventions accumulate, we’ll try to connect them to our brains—perhaps through millions of microscopic electrodes inserted into the great nerve-bundle called the corpus-callosum, the largest data base in the brain. With further advances, no part of the brain will be out of bounds for attaching new accessories. In the end, we will find ways to replace every part of the body and brain—and thus repair all the defects and flaws that make our lives so brief. Needless to say, in doing so, we’ll be making ourselves into machines.

—Professor Marvin Minsky

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, Massachusetts

October 1994

Acknowledgement

Like so many things in life, a novel is a collaborative effort. This book was conceived by my old friend Larry Kelley, a brilliant scientist, industrialist and inventor in Shelby, Michigan, who sent me a clipping from the New York Times reporting that the people who brought us Mustard Gas, Zyklon B, Heavy Hydrogen, Buzz Bombs and the Holocaust were now well on their way to building an artificial brain. His email concluded with, This Facets Project is frightening…they’re at it again.

According to the NY Times, German scientists at Heidelberg’s Facets Project were spearheading an effort to copy millions of brain connections to a computer chip for medical research. One of the Facets leaders arrogantly boasted to reporters that they were taking over where God had left off. Writers have their sources. Woodward and Bernstein had Deep Throat. I had mine. Turns out the people from Defense and CIA are interested in The Facets Project and I was told that If you think they’re trying to find a cure for Alzheimer’s or Dementia, you’re nuts.

And so the idea for the novel percolated and took root. Graciously nourished and encouraged by my wife Myrna Cushner, and with the support of friends and family, I was able to complete the manuscript in a little over one year. My editor, Michael Tarbox of Waltham Massachusetts, made much of my writing clearer and the reading better. Our friend, Irene Cohen of Boynton Beach, Florida checked the German, made suggestions and endured reviewing the manuscript more times than I can remember. Thanks go to Ernest White of Brookline, Massachusetts for carefully spell checking the manuscript and Gilbert Meyer of Boynton Beach, for his help and many valued suggestions. Thanks go to my wonderful photographers, Meaghan Farren Smith of Aliso Viejo, California for the beautiful cover and thanks to Joel Black of Boynton Beach, Florida for the photo on the back cover. They have all given unselfishly of their time and talent. I also want to thank the staff at the Llao Llao Hotel in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina for their kindness and help.

I tried to catch a tiny piece of the sadness in the soul of Cuba from first hand knowledge of the country. I am grateful to the Cuban people for teaching me the value of courage and freedom. The greatest debt I owe for turning the manuscript into a book goes to my friend and IT expert, Jim Ferguson of Slidell, Louisiana. Although retired, he gave his time unselfishly to produce print editions for LightningSource, a Division of Ingram Books, the largest book distributor in the world, CreateSpace, a division of Amazon.com, electronic books from E-books and Smashwords.com for the IPad, Kindle and host of other electronic reading devices. Without Jim, there would be no book. Thank you my friends and God bless all of you.

—A J Cushner

August 31, 2010

Chapter One

The blast lifted the building off its very foundation. The explosion lit up the late afternoon sky and shook the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts like a California earthquake. It blew out windows across the Charles River as far away as Pinckney Street on Beacon Hill in Boston. Smoke poured out of the windows of the Stata Computer Center, sending a black plume skyward. Crimson flames licked upward. Rush hour traffic along Storrow Drive slowed to a crawl. Civil Defense sirens screamed their warning. Cambridge and Boston fire and police telephones rang off the hook. The screaming sounds of ambulances and fire engines filled the cityscape.

The blast furnace of heat inside the burning building shattered glass and melted metal. Ceilings opened wide. Chunks of cement crashed to the floor below. Fire tore through cracks in the walls and scuttled anything in its way. Steel bent. Cement crumbled into molten cinder. Unbearable heat fried the building like exploding Napalm in a war zone. Sprinklers released cascades of water and flooded the floors below. Soon the water turned the fire into a thick soup of lethal smoke and smoldering debris.

Flat on my back, I felt the tile floor against my body. The stench of nitrates and charred flesh filled my nostrils. My lungs were seared, but I was still breathing. I tried to get up. I couldn’t move. I felt my blood on the floor, sticking to the back of my legs. I began to vomit. I struggled to open my eyes. It was useless. Powerless and half-dead, I waited for help and, as I lay on the floor, all the stuff that had been rattling around in my head came spilling out.

I pushed aside a mountain of pain by revisiting the puzzle that was my childhood. I thought about the time the old man changed our family name from Patrovfsky to Parker. He’d spent his life slipping in and out of identities, thinking that it would be just as easy for me. My schoolyard pals made sure it wasn’t. It took a bully bashing before schoolyard kids stopped calling me Skee and started shouting Parker. When they did, it didn't change me any more than it changed the old man.

I remembered how the old man busted into a Federal Armory on a hot summer night in 1947. And how the next day, with docks crawling with harbor cops, he smuggled five truckloads of stolen guns onto a freighter bound for Haifa. He never did a day of time. If there was a guiding lesson to my childhood, this was it. Righteous renegades who break laws never do a day of time. In fact, Israel honored him for his crime. Isn’t that the way! Heroic, almost biblical, right? I spent a lifetime trying to live up to the old man’s example and never came close.

I heard sirens outside the building. It wouldn’t be long now. I forced myself to think about the only woman I had ever loved, Karla Vanessa. She had paid the ultimate price. My arrogance made me blind. And when the gods make you so blind that you can’t tell the difference between what’s important and what’s not? That’s when it all gets blown away.

On Sundays, I visited her grave at Forest Hills. They got to know me out there. The routine was always the same. A homeless dude would greet me at the gate with a toothless smile and offer a small bouquet of slightly wilted white roses surrounded by green ferns. He’d obviously taken them from graves they’d been placed on the day before.

I saved them special for you, he’d say, as I fished a few bills from my pocket and took the flowers. What a laugh. The whole thing was so pathetic that it never occurred to me to call him on the scam.

Remembering her face grew tougher over time. It was a little like the way the faces blur as you watch them from the window of a train leaving the station. After a year, Karla Vanessa’s face dulled and slipped from my memory. I found something else to do on Sundays, and that’s when my days became easier.

***

My folks escaped Stalin and were part of the wave of Jewish refugees that hit New England’s shores in the 1930s. My brother and I grew up speaking Russian at home like two junior NKVD commissars. With old-world reverence for learning, they pushed us to master English and excel at school. My brother went to Harvard and, after four years of grad school settled into a comfortable dental practice. Papa wanted me to go to college and study law, but I had all the answers. I skipped college and, at the height of the Cold War, joined the army.

The first day of basic training, I was busted for three slim volumes of Russian poetry in my footlocker. I wasn’t naïve. We were supposed to be going to war with the Commies. I knew it was risky bringing Russian texts onto a US Army Base. I buried the books in the bottom of my footlocker, hoping that nobody would ever find them. I had made a deal with the Army. As long as I kept my nose clean and danced to their tune, they could have my body, but my brain was off limits. Fat chance! Pint sized Sergeant Luis Tex-Mex Moralez had some different ideas.

Drill Sergeant Luis Moralez, a bantamweight with a chip on his shoulder, made sure recruits felt his pain. At nearly six feet two inches tall and two hundred pounds, I towered over him, but he had the power. The diminutive Drill Sergeant had to climb onto my footlocker to go nose to nose with me. Arms akimbo, he screamed, "What the fuck you got in there Private? This ain’t no fuckin’ Playboy."

No, Sergeant.

He picked up the books. What the fuck are these and where the fuck did you get them?

Poets, Russian poets, sir.

Oh yeah? Russian poets, huh? Private, who the fuck do you think I am? Our eyes locked. Then he started laughing. Laughing hard, till tears ran down his face. When he caught his breath he opened a book. He stared at the strange Cyrillic text. He glared at me. Then his face relaxed into a satisfied smile. Probably figured there was a medal somewhere in this for him. He grabbed my arm in a steel-like vice and pushed me out in front of the entire platoon.

"Well lookie here, children. Look at what we fucking have here, he shouted out loudly enough for the cadre in the Day Room to hear. Take a good look at Ivan here. A fucking Ruskie son of a commie bitch! Well, Private Ivan Parkerooskie or whatever your fuckin’ name is! We ain’t got no commies in this man’s army. No siree. We’re gonna throw your spy ass in the fucking stockade and send you back to fucking Russia where you fucking came from."

That was my last day of Basic Training and my first day working for CIA. Within twenty-four hours Army Intelligence shipped me to Langley; after six months of eating, sleeping and breathing Russian, the Agency sent me to Eastern Europe. I returned a few years later to an assignment at The Russian Desk, where my job was playing real-life Nintendo games with our soon-to-be-Sovietsky-pals. When I retired, I left the Company the same way I came in—in darkness. They buried thirty-five years of my life without a gravestone to mark my passing. It was as if I had never existed.

Without ever having set foot in a college, my retirement present was an invitation to join the faculty of Boston University’s Slavic Language Department. I was Boston University’s oldest junior instructor and the only professor with a custom-made diploma hot off the Company’s printing press. If Faculty Dean Gregor Hettrick, whom students nicknamed Dean Hatrack, knew about my arrangement with the Company, he never let on. Instead, he treated me with the contempt tenured academics reserve for underachieving middle-aged stringers. I kept my eye on Hatrack. I figured that when it came to crunch time, he’d pay the piper.

The Dean munificently assigned me a closet-sized cubicle buried in the sub-basement of the Arts and Literature Building. My little cubby hole came complete with a gray, cold-war era steel desk, a three-legged chair, a broken file cabinet and walls that hadn’t seen paint since Armistice Day. It was dank, dreary, and as cold as a Russian prison in the winter.

At the beginning, teaching my first semester survey course in Russian poetry was about as rewarding as a message from Tammy Baker or her husband, Jimmy Swaggart. It put the students to sleep and kept my mind off Hatrack’s scowling mug. No matter. I was doing my job and keeping Hatrack off my back. No one was more surprised than I when, over the course of the semester, the kids brightened up. Maybe they mistook my passion for poetry for cool. Or maybe they liked the way I’d give anyone who showed up for class a stellar grade. Whatever it was that turned them on, by the end of the term, they were reciting translations of Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva.(¹)

I was proud of my little scholars, and having rapt co-eds hang on my every word was doing wonders for my worn ego. The buzz around Sherman Student Union marked me as an easy grader. My second-term classes quickly filled up, giving me three lecture sections. It wasn’t too long before, to my colleagues’ horror, I’d become the Department’s rising star. I found their resentment entertaining.

I was sitting in my tiny basement office between passages of Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak polishing my syllabus when the phone rang.(²)

Parker, this is Dean Hettrick. I’m getting complaints.

Really Dean? What kind of complaints? My students seem pretty enthusiastic.

The complaints are about how you graded last term’s course.

You mean the kids aren’t happy with their grades? I responded biting my lip.

No, not your students, Hatrack snorted. Why would they complain? You gave them all ‘A’s. It’s the faculty. They don’t understand how the whole class gets perfect grades.

Well, Dean, I had a pretty exceptional group of students last term, I said. I nearly choked as I tried to stop myself from laughing out loud.

Look, Parker. You had half the hockey and basketball teams in your class. You expect me to believe they excel in nineteenth-century Russian poetry?

Twentieth-century poetry, actually.

His voice clenched. Do you presume to correct me? I want to see all of the final examination blue books from last term.

I’d love to accommodate you Dean, but I can’t. I graded them and they’re on their way back to the students. I was bending the truth, a specialty I’d developed at CIA. The fact was that I’d tried to return the examination blue books to the students, but couldn’t get the goddamned things out of the jammed drawer of my ancient steel desk. Hettrick had dumped this farcical office furniture on me. If it didn’t work, maybe he could stop by with a chain saw to get what he wanted.

"Parker, I don’t care where the exam books are. Just tell your little geniuses to return them to you. Then bring them to me. Do you understand, Mister Parker? he asked, avoiding calling me Professor Parker."

Yes, Dean, I certainly do. I’d had enough of his tight-assed nonsense and was more than ready to put the phone down. But he hadn’t finished.

One more thing. I want you to go to Cambridge this afternoon and pick up a few cartons of reformatted language discs at the MIT Computer Science Lab. I expect to see you—with the discs and those exam books—at ten o’clock Monday morning in my office. Then the line went dead.

***

It was late in the day when I drove along the Cambridge side of Massachusetts Avenue in my battered blue Honda. A wet winter snow blanketed the streets as the afternoon light gave way to dark. The evening’s first moonlight silhouetted the jumbled shapes of MIT’s Stata Computer Center.

I parked the Civic, cursed as I stumbled through the slush and made my way into the building. A dusty clock hanging in the lobby read 5:00 P.M. The only soul in sight was a lanky kid reading a book at the front desk.

Where can I find the computer language lab? I asked. I glanced at the book he was reading. It was in Spanish. When he looked up, I saw a pair of clear blue eyes beneath a shock of unkempt yellow hair.

"Die fiert floor," he said with a discernible German accent.

Which floor? I asked once again.

"Die fourth floor," he repeated more clearly without looking up.

I double-checked the floor directory, which listed the lab on the fifth floor. I wondered why he’d told me the fourth, but I said nothing. I walked to the elevator and hit the button numbered 5.

The door slid open on the fifth floor and I stepped into a faintly lit corridor. Except for the echo of footsteps it was silent. The light spilling from the elevator was enough to let me see someone with blond hair carrying a silver metal attaché case scurry down the corridor. The figure disappeared into a stairwell. I prowled the gloomy hallway, looking for the lab.

The rooms along the corridor were dark. I turned a corner and found myself looking at a pair of biometric scanners by the entry to one of the labs. A sign above the security device read:

ROOM 513

MIT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY

PROFESSOR RODION ROYCHAYA, CHAIRMAN

AUTHORIZED ENTRY ONLY

A dull beam of light traced its way from the lab into the corridor. All the high-tech security in the world doesn’t mean jack if the last clown out doesn’t close the door.

I wondered what a guy with a surname dating back to Ivan The Terrible was doing in a secured state-of-the-art AI lab. I pushed the door open and stole a peek into Professor Rodion Roychaya’s world. The lab occupied a surprisingly large space. Workbenches crowded the room; cubicles lined the walls. I could make out the silhouette of a figure hunched over a desk on the far side of the lab. I stepped in.

Hello, excuse me! I’m looking for the language lab, I shouted. I waited a moment and took a few steps closer. Maybe he hadn’t heard me. I called again; no answer. I moved closer. I surveyed the room. It had been ransacked. Books, papers and computer discs littered the floor. The lab had been thoroughly tossed.

I moved toward the figure in the back. I got closer and froze. An old man slumped sideways against the desk. His head lay on the desk in a pool of blood. His profile was a placid, drooling mask. Blood oozed lazily from his ruined skull. I yanked him back by the collar. His forehead had been shorn away by a massive force. I looked at the blood stained ID badge on his coat. I’d found Roychaya—or what was left of him.

I’ve seen headshots. But this was no bullet wound. It was different, as if something had exploded and ripped the top of his skull off. I peered down. Fragments of cranial bone jutted from his blood-swamped brain like jagged shards of glass. His body was warm. I looked at the desk. There were smudges of Cyrillic letters in dried blood where his right hand had been resting. I stared at the distorted letters scrawled in blood for a moment until I made out two words: тысяча лет

There was more. I turned my head to see if I could read the rest of the message. But as it dried, the blood had collected in pools and congealed, concealing other words from view. I whispered the only two decipherable words aloud slowly: "tees-yachalet." I looked into the corpse’s shocked eyes and wondered what else the Professor had written.

A sharp noise snapped me back to reality. Something beeping, like the alarm on a quartz wristwatch. I recognized the sound. It was the sound of a detonator timer. It grew louder, piercing at my ears. It was close. I looked under the desk, but only saw a computer processor. I ripped at the wires holding the computer. I pushed the computer aside and peered under the desk. The space was empty.

Where was it? Find it before it’s too late. The noise was coming faster and faster. Try the back of the desk. With one quick move, I was back on my feet and heaved the metal desk backwards. I heard myself breathing hard. I could feel my heart pounding. I bent over the back of the desk. I looked down. I could see the plastic explosive.

There it was, a bomb, maybe ten pounds of RDX. The detonator wires were attached to a circular black and red-faced timer. It was all neatly taped tightly together to the metal desk. The red light on the detonator was blinking. I reached down to pull out the wires. Three wires. I pulled the white ground first. The detonator timer suddenly began pulsing in a high screeching whirr. Wrong wire. Son of a bitch had booby-trapped the detonation device. I was out of time. Pulling another wire was useless. I had five seconds. I began counting. One…two…I turned, three…four…I jumped back and ran into the hall. I turned the corner of the corridor when an instantaneous white flash, the clash of shearing metal and waves of mind-melting heat caught me from behind. Glass shredded my legs as the blast hurled me against the far wall. Then it all went black.

Chapter Two

When I came to, the sunlight from a window fell across my face. The caustic smell of antiseptic hung in the air. I squinted at the world around me and slowly began to make out broad outlines. I was in a hospital bed; a shadowy figure sat beside me.

How you feeling? a hollow voice asked. I recognized the voice. It was my old boss, Ed Northrop. He sounded like he was talking into a can with a string tied to it.

Three weeks after 9/11, The White House gave Northrop a blank check to build a fully functioning Counter Terrorist Unit. He had CTU up and running in a record four months’ time.

My hearing’s shot, I whispered hoarsely.

I’m not surprised. You got caught on the edge of a blast radius and took a giant concussion. You’ve been delirious for two days.

I tried to speak but it came out as a whisper. Guess I won’t be jogging along the Charles this morning.

Don’t talk. Get some rest. I’ll be back in a few hours and we’ll talk then, he said and left.

I closed my eyes. Ed Northrop. What was the boss doing here? It had to be something big, something about the blast. My mind churned backwards. I saw the Stata Center, Professor Rodion Roychaya’s lab, the bloody brain fragments, the message "tees-yachalet," the RDX plastic explosive, and the booby trap wires. I remembered it all, including the dirty job the boss asked me to do at the Company before I quit. Northrop and me, we had history.

***

Ed Northrop was the first person I met at the Company. We arrived at the same time from different places. He had a Ph.D. in History from Yale and another degree in Government. I had a high school diploma and a pair of Army dog tags. I was a drone in the Russian section and Northrop became Chief of the Counter Terrorist Unit.

I had gone to work early one morning when the phone rang. It was Northrop. He was very direct. Josh, I hear that things are quieting down in your section. How would you like to work at CTU?

"What do you have in mind?" I asked.

"I know you speak a few languages besides Russian and English."

"Italian and Spanish, but not all that well."

"How about Hebrew?"

"I thought you were an Episcopalian. You planning on getting Bar Mitzvahed?"

He laughed. Not exactly. Are you up to some new tricks?

I answered without skipping a beat. It’ll take me two weeks to finish up here.

On the day I reported to CTU, Northrop got to it immediately. How do you feel about working with Israelis?

"Dunno. Got a particular job in mind?"

Northrop paused before answering. I think they may approach you to go over.

"I thought we were on the same side."

"Yeah. I