Stronger: A Super Human Clash (12 page)

For the first few weeks in Texas, Harmony’s people thought it would be a good idea to train me. After all, I was still only fifteen and, in their opinion, just a kid. They figured that I ought to receive the same basic training as everyone else in the military.

That quickly proved to be a waste of time: I could already run much faster and for much longer than even the fittest of the instructors, and the weights were a joke to someone who could bench-press a school bus. I demolished the punching bag on my first go, and it was pointless teaching me how to use a gun when my fingers were too large to easily fit the trigger guard.

So Harmony decided that it would be more beneficial to train my mind instead. “It’s time to hit the schoolbooks, Brawn. Six hours a day, six days a week,” she told me. “English, math, history, geography, the works. You’d be in high school by now, tenth grade, so you’ve a lot of work ahead of you if you want to catch up.”

“Who’s going to teach me?”

“We selected an old friend of yours. You’ll meet him this evening. Lessons begin tomorrow morning.”

The old friend turned out to be Dr. Gordon Tremont, the man who’d taught me how to speak when I was in Antarctica.

In the three years since we’d last met, he’d lost some of the excess weight he used to carry around, and looked stronger and
more confident. “Gethin Rao,” he said with a broad smile as he entered my quarters. “They didn’t tell me that
you
were to be my new pupil! I honestly never thought I’d see you again.”

“How are you, Doc?”

“As well as can be expected, young man. How old are you now? Fourteen?”

“Fifteen.”

He nodded at that. “Fifteen. Well, well. As they say, time flies like an arrow. And fruit flies like an apple.”

“Er,
pardon
?”

“I’ll leave that one with you.” He sat down on the wooden chair opposite me. “I am now your teacher, so they tell me. Hmm. It’s been a long time since I taught anyone of your age, but I’m sure that together we can muddle through. Tell me … Did you escape or did they release you?”

“I escaped. About a year after you left.”

“A
year
? Dear Lord, what’s wrong with these people? But you escaped, that’s the key thing. Excellent. I do hope you caused a lot of damage along the way!”

I nodded. “Yep. And it took them another two years to find me.”

“And now, here we are, together again.” He looked around. “The décor has changed, at least that’s something. And your door is open. But I suspect that your movements are still restricted, yes?”

“Well, yeah. But they tell me that’s more for my
own
safety than anything else. I don’t know how much Harmony’s told you, but I’m being kept secret for now.”

Dr. Tremont shrugged. “I’m sure they have their reasons….
How’s the food here? I recall that it wasn’t up to much in Antarctica.”

“It’s a
lot
better. We even get pizza on Fridays.”

“That’s good to hear. Even the soldiers in Antarctica had to eat that slop. An operative in the computer room once told me that they had to wolf down their food before it froze.”

I grinned. “I don’t feel sorry for anyone who was there voluntarily.” That triggered a thought that had never occurred to me before. “They
were
volunteers, right?”

“I believe so,” the doctor said. “I could name a dozen computer experts who’d jump at the chance to work on cutting-edge microprocessor design, despite having to work in subzero temperatures.” Then he added, “Computer processors work faster in the cold, you see.”

“Why’s that?”

I couldn’t help noticing the flash of disappointment across his face. “Ah. You don’t know anything about how computers work?”

“You mean, like, on the inside? Not a lot. In school we learned about binary numbers and that computers have got billions of teeny on-off switches inside them, and if a switch is off, that represents zero, and if it’s on, it represents one.” I shrugged. “That’s about it.”

“Pity. Computers are what it’s all about, Gethin.” He raised his eyes to the ceiling and pursed his lips as he thought. “How can I best put this? Computer processors are dumb. All they can really do is count and compare values. But they can do that extremely quickly. Say you want to crack an encrypted
file but you don’t know the password. All you know is that it’s a six-digit number. You could start with all the zeros and work your way up. That’s a million combinations, right? Let’s say for the sake of argument that you have to go through all the combinations, and each one takes one second. A seven-digit password would take ten times as long, right?”

I nodded. “OK …”

“But how long does it take to crack a password that’s
thirteen
characters long? Assuming that you have to check every combination.”

I had to think about that. “If seven digits is ten seconds, then eight is a hundred, nine is a thousand seconds…. A thirteen-digit combination would take ten million seconds.”

“Correct. If you’d given any other answer to that, I’d have abandoned this right now! So, ten million seconds is about one hundred and sixteen days. Fourteen digits would take ten times that long, about three-point-two years.”

“Wow.”

“Wow indeed. But our files here, for example, have
twenty-four
-digit passwords.”

I did my best to run this through my head.
Fourteen is three-point-two years, so fifteen would be thirty-two years, sixteen would be three hundred and twenty.
… When I got to the end, I said, “That can’t be right.”

“What answer did you get?”

“Thirty-two trillion years.”

The doctor grinned again. “It really messes with your mind, doesn’t it?”

“But if you have lots of computers all working on it, they could divide up the numbers to check. You know, each one checks a different range of combinations.”

“Ah!” the doctor said, grinning. “But suppose you have a password that’s not twenty-four digits long, but
fifty
? Even with a million computers checking, the process would take so much time that the universe would come to an end long before you were finished. What you’d need is a computer that could check all the combinations at the same time.”

“That’s impossible,” I said.

Dr. Tremont leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “With current technology, yes, it’s impossible. But not with quantum computing. Quantum theory—nothing to do with the superhuman who uses that name, by the way—basically tells us that all possibilities exist at once.” He chewed on his lower lip for a moment. “It’s hard to get your head around this, I know, but it’s real. Think of it like this: What if an infinite number of universes exist parallel to ours? In each one there’s the same computer attempting to decrypt the same file. If you can establish communication between each of those computers, and you assign them a specific code to check, then your answer comes back almost instantly.”

This was really making me dizzy. “No … But
that’s
impossible!”

“That’s not actually how quantum computing works, but it’s a handy way to visualize it. As for whether it’s possible … A lot of people seem to think it’s not only possible, but inevitable. Right now, there are more than a dozen companies and institutions in the USA trying to develop quantum processors,
a hundred more throughout the rest of the world. If anyone
can
get quantum computing to work, the possibilities are endless. People talk about artificial intelligence as the ultimate goal of computer technology. Brawn, those people are thinking
small.
… Quantum computing would allow us to create something a lot more exciting: artificial omniscience.”

“Omniscience,” I said. “That’s all-knowing, right?”

“Exactly. An omniscient computer would change the shape of human civilization forever. If you wanted to know the answer to even the most complex problem, you could just ask it and it would tell you.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like
that
.”

I said, “Wow … But wouldn’t a truly omniscient computer know that you wanted to know the answer before you asked it?”

Tremont smiled and nodded. “Bingo! Gethin, I’ve been through many conversations like this with many other students, and you’re the first one to make that deduction. Yes, whoever creates the first working quantum processor will instantly become the most powerful person in the world.”

“You think that’s what they were working on in Antarctica?”

“It’s possible. It would certainly explain the large number of computers they had and the extreme cold of some of their labs. It’s my guess that they intend to raid every other facility working on quantum processing. They’ll use you as muscle to get in, then send in their hackers…. But that’s a discussion for another day, I think….” His knees cracked as he stood up, and then he stretched and yawned. “Look at that—dark
outside already. They’ve set me up with an office on the far side of the base. It’s got a bed, a hot plate, and a TV set. All the comforts of modern life.”

I stood up too. “I’ll walk back with you. I’m allowed out when it’s dark. During the day there’s the chance that I’d be spotted by airplanes passing overhead.”

He walked ahead of me, moving quite slowly. “Very sensible. Can’t have fresh photos of you appearing in the newspapers, can we? Not if you’re supposed to be a secret.”

I ducked my head as we passed through the hangar doors and out onto the concrete. It was still warm under my bare feet from a day of sunlight. The two soldiers posted at the doors fell into step behind us.

“True. Though if anyone
did
publish new photos, I suppose that they wouldn’t be …” I stopped walking, and the soldiers almost crashed into me.

Dr. Tremont also stopped, and looked back at me. “Something the matter?”

“I’m not sure…. Doc, I always thought that commercial aircraft weren’t
allowed
to fly over military bases. So why would Harmony tell me to stay out of sight?”

He looked puzzled for a moment. “But the base was officially decommissioned. I expect that the no-fly restrictions were lifted.”

We resumed walking. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

“Things have changed, Gethin. I’m sure that Ms. Yuan and her people have only your best interests in mind.”

“Ha!”

“You don’t agree? You don’t trust them?”

“She
says
everything’s changed, but after the way they hunted me down? No, I don’t trust them. I think they stopped trying to kill me only because I was costing them a fortune. Eight and a half billion dollars, she said. I can’t believe it cost
that
much.”

“Well, I’m sure that those two helicopters you destroyed weren’t cheap,” Dr. Tremont said. “It’s not like damaging a car. Cars can be repaired, but I can’t imagine anyone brave enough to get back into a helicopter that’s already crashed!”

I stopped again, and turned to the two soldiers. “Guys, can you give us a minute?”

“We’re sposta—” Technically they were disobeying orders by not sticking close to me, but I could tell from their expressions that they were just as scared of me as most people were.

“Just wait over there,” I said, pointing back toward the hangar. “I’m not going anywhere.”

We watched the soldiers walk away, and then the doctor asked, “What’s bothering you, son?”

“It’s the whole secrecy thing they’ve got going on. A huge base in Antarctica, this place here, everything else. I mean, they took you in the middle of the night, right? Blindfolded you so you didn’t even know where you were going!”

“That’s the way these sorts of people operate, Gethin. They can’t trust anyone.”

“Can I? Can
I
trust anyone?”

He smiled. “Well, you can trust me.”

“Yeah … Y’see, Doc, that’s what’s bugging me. How did you know that we were in Antarctica?”

“Surely you don’t suspect me, do you? Gethin, I’m one of
the world’s foremost experts in computer technology. I recognized some of the hardware they were using. It was bespoke stuff—handmade, not off the shelf. When I was brought home, I hacked into the manufacturer’s files. I found out who paid for it—turned out to be a dummy company—but tracking the hardware itself was rather simple.”

I knelt down, and sat back on my heels so that we were almost eye to eye. “How did you know about the helicopters?”

“Gethin, really! You’re becoming paranoid!”

“But if she told you about that, why were you so surprised to see me? Your story doesn’t add up, Doctor.” I leaned closer. “Who are you?”

“You
know
who I am!”

“It’s all fake, isn’t it? You’re working for them, and you have been all along. In Venezuela they discovered that they couldn’t kill me, so instead they decided to recruit me. They made up a bunch of lies to get me on their side, and they brought you in because they figured I’d trust you.”

Dr. Tremont ran his right hand over his chin as he stared at me. “You’ve got it all wrong. I swear, I do
not
work for them.”

I shook my head. “I don’t believe you. It’s just another trick.”

“You’re big, and strong, and fast, Gethin. Powerful enough to kill everyone on this base. But before you go flying off the handle, you have to ask yourself one very important question, OK?”

“What’s that?”

“You must ask yourself if you’re sure—if you’re absolutely
certain
—that you are fast enough and strong enough to find and rescue your parents before we kill them.”

He turned around, and as he was walking away, he called over his shoulder, “But there is one thing I wasn’t lying about, Brawn. I
don’t
work for them. They work for me.”

I DIDN’T SLEEP THAT NIGHT
. I rarely slept much anyway, but that night I lay on the ground just outside the hangar doors and looked up at the stars.

I couldn’t think how to get out of the situation. There was no way to know whether Tremont’s people had my parents held prisoner somewhere, or if they were just watching them. Whatever the case there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to help them.

Harmony came by once, at about two in the morning. “You need your sleep. Lessons start in a few hours.”