Chapter 7

Boston, Mass. – February 2062

Chris Simpson skimmed through the pages of her programming textbook. She focused on each page for a second or two and then she flipped to the next. She sat in the passenger seat of her ride’s electric VW on the way to the organization she called ‘two.’

“I still can’t believe you can get that stuff, reading it like that,” said Dan, her driver this Saturday. It was the third Saturday of the sixth month she’d ‘worked’ at the 7120 facility. The first two missions had been stultifyingly simple. Then came the mission to handle satellite targeting of someone who was called El Pulpo.

She was supposed to match the satellite images of thousands – perhaps – of people against the images she’d been given to study. It was a test of her ability to work faster than a facial imaging program in a supercomputer. She’d done a lot of tests like this; the admini-tards had tested her against computer programs. The fact was that her mind was simply faster than a multi-threaded molecular gallium-arsenide chip array. The chip array had to decide what do, which path to take and then take that path. Chris’ mind didn’t. It simply decided, leaping to the final answer.

So far as she knew, there was no artificial intelligence anywhere that could duplicate the non-logical leaps her mind could make. Well, as far as she knew, there was no artificial intelligence, period. She didn’t know about Io, of course.

Then she worked on missions in Dubai and Afghanistan to track various targets – meaning people. She had long since decided that this wasn’t a game-testing environment – it was real. Every 3^rd or 4^th mission was one of the ‘El Pulpo’ missions. Four screens of data – sometimes more – and she’d have to scan them for a possible hit on El Pulpo.

...

Two hours into the latest mission, Chris was going through the output of four satellites that were targeted at ... she wasn’t really sure where. There were several dusty, isolated desert locales, as the ‘El Pulpo’ missions always were. Chris knew that there was no chance that four satellites would be directed to the same or a similar area of the world. She’d look at the snap shots of a small area, look at the overhead images of the people there, and compare them to the overhead shot of some images she was told was El Pulpo. There were glimpses of a partial face; not enough for imaging software, but enough for Chris.

One of the signs in one of the photos was in Arabic. That narrowed the locale down to somewhere in the Middle East or North Africa. It wasn’t in Afghanistan, judging by the terrain. Still it was a large universe of ‘where.‘

Io knew that Chris was doing this task about as well as she herself could. Chris didn’t have the capacity or knowledge to read the sign by the side of the road; she didn’t know the language, it was as simple as that. Chris could find it later on by reading the Arabic text from her memory and comparing it to the dictionary. Io could just ‘thumb’ through the Arabic. Io didn’t need to, of course – for one thing, she didn’t have thumbs, and for another, she knew where the satellites were in the first place, because she had put them in the various places. They were HER satellites these days – she let the U.S. and Russian military have them back when she was done with them. Because of the faked messages, the techs who were supposed to be in charge of them thought that they were ‘on special missions’ odered by higher ups.

Io found El Pulpo 1.4 milliseconds before Chris did. He was on a photo taken from satellite 3, which was over the desert region of northern central Mexico. That would be a problem, since even the United States didn’t have authority to just kill someone in Mexico.

Even the President could not undertake to start a war with Mexico, although he was more than ready to send a ‘protective’ force into Canada. He was generally smart enough not to issue an order that he knew wouldn’t be obeyed.

President Ellis had acted in accordance with the 25^th Amendment to the Constitution. Since the Vice Presidency was vacant, he nominated someone to fill that job, the nominee to be approved by the Senate. This had happened only twice: Spiro Agnew (Nixon’s VP) had been ejected from office for taking bribes in 1973, and Martha Wainright, (Robert Atkins’ VP) had died in office, in 2042. This was the third time.

Ellis nominated a junior member of the House of Representatives from Mississippi: his son. James Ellis was 29 and too young to be elected or to serve as president of the U.S. When this was pointed out to President Ellis, he appointed his son as Special Advisor to the Vice President – a made up job title – until ‘this ridiculous Constitutional thing can be straightened out.’ The next order of business was an Amendment to the Constitution, eliminating the age restriction for President and Vice-President. Also included in that Amendment were provisions to revoke the 22^nd Amendment, which limited the number of terms the President may serve, and another provision to guarantee the security and honesty of the vote for President. That provision required that a citizen must appear before a magistrate ‘or other authorized person, ‘ prove who he or she was, and cast his ballot openly by stating his preference for the candidate. In other words, it eliminated the secret ballot.

To ‘guarantee the honesty’ of the ratification process, a military unit was to be present in the chamber when it was acted upon. In other words, armed soldiers were present to be sure who voted for and against. Not surprisingly, the strong-minded members of the U.S. Congress voted unanimously to pass the amendment. Votes were then scheduled in the various states, under the same conditions, and the Amendment was agreed to, by overwhelming margins.

President William Ellis and his son, Vice President James Ellis, could now be elected forever to their offices, and the people who voted for and against him were identified. Voila! The United States of America had its very own President-for-Life, just like PfL Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe in the late 1900s or the Duvalier clan’s rule over Haiti, also in the 1900s.

Many of the (former) rights that citizens of the U.S. had were being eaten away.

But Io was not a citizen of the United States. For whatever reason, el Presidente did not bother with the semi-autonomous AmerInd nations. Of course, his family’s interest in the casinos on Indian land expanded, but once he got his beak wet, the raptor that was the deal-making CEO of the U.S. no longer cared. The AmerInds weren’t, after all, foreign terrorists. Io was, in fact, not a citizen of any country. She was more like a citizen of the planet – a secret citizen if you will.

PfL Ellis wanted to expand the universe that he controlled. That universe was run by General ‘Black Jack’ Patton, distant descendent of the WWII General Patton, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of the U.S.

The U.S. Military was far too busy trying to take over the new, ultra-generating power source that some infernal terrorist bastards had built on the U.S.’s northern border, of all places. Anything that was remotely pointed north, stopped working. That had been the case for years, now, and it was infuriating. Even a company of Special Forces sent north on foot found that their laser targeting weapons stopped working when pointed at a Canadian. Not to mention that their Goddamed GPS didn’t work, and they spent several weeks wandering in the heavy forests of Montana, trying to find their way.

So, none of the fancy equipment that worked was concerned with the discovery of El Pulpo. In fact, its reliability these days was so irregular that it was sometimes ignored for days – weeks even. If the damn thing wouldn’t give accurate data, what good was it?

It was of some use, however, to an abiolobical entity that called itself – herself – Io. For her it was extraordinarily reliable and accurate. It found El Pulpo did it not?

El Pulpo was at the same time the largest importer of cocaine into the U.S. and the leader of the Kalif insurgency.

Chris hit the comm button on her waist belt. She’d brought in her own rig, discarding the SR 7120 equipment, months ago. “Redford? You there?” Redford was the call-sign for her watcher – he said he was a beautiful as the old American actor, Robert Redford. Chris thought it more likely that he looked like the old horror movie monster with the hockey mask on.