Page 32 of Clive Cussler's Quantum Tempest
Linlin smiled impishly.
“Agreed.”
18
California
Dr.Noam Peretz stood on another planet, or so it seemed. Planted on the curve of the steep mountain trail at nearly seven thousand feet, he took in the God’s-eye view of the pale granite peaks across the wide horizon, jagged and bleached like broken bones stabbing at the crystalline sky. A pewter-blue lake far below was dusted with dazzlingly white snow glistening beneath the silver disk of the sun.
The cold air clawed at his lungs with each shallowing breath. But Peretz needed this badly. Nothing thrilled his soul more than being on the trail. His daily life in Silicon Valley was crowded with endless demands; a constant bombardment of investor queries, team meetings, and project deadlines. Worse, his colliding worlds of bioinformatics and computational genomics saturated his fevered mind with endless webs of equations and algorithms, even in his troubled sleep. Only out here, in nature’s grandeur, and alone on the trail far from people, could he ever find peace and clarity.
Peretz dropped his ultralight pack and yanked out a fleece pullover against the rising chill. It had been six months since he’d been on any trail, and even longer in the high Sierra Nevadas. He’d hiked all his life, and his booted feet had taken him over some of the roughest terrain on the planet. He’d even met his first ex-wife on the Pacific Crest Trail while still in grad school. But these granite spires were still his favorite.
His extreme work schedule had been part of the problem. Pioneering new bioengineering approaches to neural network architectures in the development of organoid intelligence was more than time-consuming. He was practically inventing a new subfield of computer science. A trillion dollars of global venture capital hung on desperate tenterhooks waiting for his next breakthrough.
But what had really kept Peretz off the trail was the sudden and thoroughly maddening onset of EIB—exercise-induced bronchoconstriction. Years of working indoors and sucking in the pollen-infested and chemically saturated air of cities and labs around the world had brought on a series of frightening asthma-like attacks whenever he hit the trail.
On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Peretz engaged the help of both a medical AI program and an exercise researcher at Stanford. Together they developed a workout regimen that had put him tentatively back on the trail. Over time, he’d been able to extend the range, duration, and altitude of his hikes.
Today was his first big test, and so far he’d passed with flying colors. By pacing himself, limiting his gear weight to less than ten pounds, and hydrating at regular intervals, Peretz hadn’t needed his inhaler at all to reach this point. His biggest challenge on this or any hike was high altitude. Temperatures dropped an average of three and a half degrees every thousand feet, and oxygen saturation fell about the same. They had estimated that his EIB would likely be triggered at seven thousand feet, a prognosis now confirmed with each stabbing breath coming on faster and shallower.
If the EIB kicked into overdrive, it could kill him.
But a quick hit of albuterol would act as a prophylactic and give him the boost he needed to ascend the next leg of the trail. His plan was to hit eighty-five hundred feet today and set up camp for the night before pushing on to ten thousand tomorrow.
Peretz reached into his pack and pulled out his inhaler. He took another glance around the granite valley, wishing his life were different. He wasn’t sure why it wasn’t. He had more money than he could ever spend in a dozen lifetimes. Was it the thrill of being the first tocross the line? To build the first AGI machine known to man, and usher in a golden age of human progress?
Those were exactly the kinds of questions he’d come up here to escape.
He popped the cap on his inhaler, put it into his mouth, and drew the deepest lungful of vaporized medicine he could draw.
Peretz held his breath for as long as he could to allow the albuterol vapor to saturate his lungs.
And then he coughed.
And coughed.
And coughed.
Peretz doubled over. Something was wrong. He couldn’t catch his breath. He panicked. His shallow breaths turned to panting, and his nose began to run.
He dropped to his knees, wiping away the snot pouring out of his nose and coughing up strings of sticky phlegm gurgling in his throat. His trembling fingers tore at his shirt, trying to free his lungs that felt like they were being crushed inside a hydraulic press.
His quaking body toppled over into the rocky dirt, his diaphragm hard as stone. His oxygen-starved brain blurred his vision until his beloved mountains narrowed to a singular point of mindless black.
?
She approached the body curled up in a fetal position, lying on the trail, an empty inhaler by his hand—and clearly dead. It didn’t bother her. She was a doctor and no stranger to corpses. She removed her pack.
Peretz was the only person on the trail she’d seen all day, and he’d been hours ahead of her. She pulled on a glove and checked his carotid. No pulse. His deoxygenated skin was pale as parchment, and his lips blue as India ink. She shuddered as a cold breeze gusted over them.
She actually felt a little sorry for him. She had shadowed Peretz ever since he’d left the trailhead six hours earlier. His speed and endurance were impressive considering his EIB. Fortunately, she was an athlete in prime condition and was able to keep up.
She’d met Peretz at a Stanford alumni dinner a few years ago. He was brilliant and funny and even a little flirty, and between his second and third marriages, as she recalled. An almost comical mop of hair belied the ferocious intellect inside his skull. Her MD/PhD in pharmacology with an emphasis in neuroscience allowed her to almost keep up with him during their intense conversation over cocktails that night. She sensed even then Peretz was throwing open doors into a new and frightening future. What scared her most was his nonchalance about it.
Peretz cut their conversation short because he was late for the keynote speech he was about to give. He left a spare room key on the bar top next to her, but she passed. He had sent a chill down her spine. Peretz was like the civil engineer who made sure the trains ran on time with no concern where those boxcars wound up, even if they might unload their human cargoes at Auschwitz. Surely he understood the social, political, and economic crises AGI was about to unleash on the world if it fell into the wrong hands—but if he did, he didn’t seem to care. AGI could be used by dark forces to cripple whole economies, incite civil wars, and establish techno-dictatorships. Such dictatorships would construct an inescapable surveillance state where every action, word, and transaction could be monitored, controlled, or prevented.
And with such a powerful weapon, there could be no “good” hands—that kind of absolute power would absolutely corrupt whoever possessed it.
