Turn or Burn (2 page)

“Wait a minute.”

“Later, Teddy.”

I closed my phone and looked up the hill.

As the car drew closer, Ted’s face became visible behind the wheel.
Damn it.

I turned and started running.

His shadow appeared. I breathed slowly and quietly. Didn’t move at all. Waiting for the perfect time.

The sky was darker now. Colder. One 40-watt lightbulb that I’d accidentally left on the night before swung from the ceiling inside the shed. It lit his shadow and then his body as he stepped back outside into the night. Directly below me.

He hadn’t changed much. Still six-five—four inches taller than me. Built like he was training for something. I noticed a little balding circle on the top of his head, the size of a cup holder. That was my target. He turned his head left and right, scanning my property. “Tofu!” he yelled.

I let go and jumped. I landed feet first on his shoulders and he dropped hard, knees to chest to the gravel. He grunted as the breath left his lungs. I fell on top of him and went straight for his neck. I threw my forearm around and tried to cut off his oxygen. He didn’t give up easily, though. He got to his knees and kicked my shin with a nasty sideswipe. Just about broke my leg. He flung me off, and I hit the side of the shed and dropped into the dirt.

Ted stood and looked down at me. I pulled myself up before he could kick me again. I stood a foot from him. Looked him in the eyes.

We smiled at each other and opened our arms. Both exhausted, we embraced and broke into hearty laughter. “It’s been too long,” he said, letting go of me.

I put my hands on his upper arms and looked at him very seriously. “Oh, Teddy boy, I wish I could say the same. I thought I’d be fortunate enough to never see you again.”

“Nothing changes, does it?”

“Everything changes. Last time I saw you, you weren’t losing hair. That has to be eating you
up
inside.”

He tried not to laugh and shook his head.

“Where have you been?” I asked. “How long have you been back?”

“Mostly Africa, protecting some DOD kooks. Dumb work. Got back a couple months ago. Been in Seattle ever since.”

I hit him on the back. “Let’s get you fed. Pump you full of greens. Try to grow some of that hair back.”

“I didn’t know greens did that.”

“Clearly.”

“You’re still not eating animals?” he asked me as we started toward my house.

I’d been a vegetarian since I was five. “Nope. I’m still not eating animals.”

“Same day you learn it’s best to leave me alone. Can’t you see I’m trying to get away?  You know I love you, brother, but…you know.”  I pulled at the corkscrew, and the cork popped out of a shiner of Syrah a friend down the road had given me. I poured an ounce into my glass and sniffed it to make sure it wasn’t corked, then shared it with Ted.

We were sitting at the long wooden table on my back porch. I’d showered. This wasn’t our first bottle. The sun had already done its thing for the day, and the great and mighty night sky of Eastern Washington surrounded us in its terrifyingly humbling way, giving us a glimpse into the unknown, reminding us that we were nothing more than a tiny little part of it all. I’d seen more constellations on my porch than anywhere else in the world.

For the better part of an hour, we laughed at old war stories. Ted could tell them better than anyone. Like the time in Honduras, one of his first missions, when he and another Green Beret were sent to a beach to build a defensive barrier with sandbags. They’d been given four days to complete their mission. The day they arrived, they hired one hundred Honduran boys for a dollar apiece, and the barrier was done in a couple hours. They spent the next three days lying on the beach drinking beer and getting a suntan. That’s the Green Beret way: delegate.

And the time he almost got caught with marijuana in his system. I never smoked much but a lot of Green Berets did. Instead of
Be all you can be,
it was
Be all you can pee.
Ted took part in the ganja from time to time, especially in his twenties. He grew up on Bainbridge Island west of Seattle; how could you blame him? Back on base in North Carolina, while firing his M-16 on the range, he and the others were told that they were to be tested directly after leaving. Luckily, one of the food trucks that rode around base was coming by. Ted bought some apple juice. Just before he got in line for testing, he took a big sip, swishing it in his mouth to warm it up, holding it there until it was his turn. They handed him the pee cup, and he somehow spit the juice in without them seeing and went on to pretend he was peeing into it. Well, he passed. Who would have known? Of course, that was back in the old days; I’m not sure that would work anymore.

Roman had his head on my foot. The vineyards sloped down toward the Yakima River in front of us, and we were looking beyond that, out over the sparkling lights of Benton City, which was really more of a village than anything resembling an urban community. One bank. A hardware store. A tire store. A damn fine diner called the Shadow Mountain Grill. That’s about it. Come to think of it, Red Mountain, where I lived, was more of a hill than a mountain. Perhaps those of us from around there had delusions of grandeur.

Good, simple people, the ones that lived down the hill.  Farmers and rodeo types.  People like my mom and dad, here long before the winemakers discovered the vineyard potential.

In fact, I lived in the house my parents had raised me in. I’d done some renovating, but my dad built a strong, timeless stone house back in the sixties. Tall ceilings. Fireplaces up and down. Giant windows that looked out over the vineyards and orchards in every direction.

“That’s good wine,” Ted said, setting down his glass. “You got the life, don’t you?” 

“Life can be good out here. It’s supposed to be. That’s what they tell me.”  I stabbed a piece of Comt
é
cheese with my knife and stuck it in my mouth.

“Still feeling sorry for yourself, I see.”

I gave a half-assed smile.

He rubbed his face. “When’d you start wearing a beard? Is that the farmer coming out?”

I touched my patchy beard. “Something about being back on a tractor makes you feel like you need one.”

“It looks good. In all honesty, man. You look good. Better than before, I mean. Much better. I thought I was losing you for a little while.”

“You were.” I decided to change the subject. Green Berets don’t do emotional real well. “What is it that you want, Ted?  Let’s get this over with, so I can say no.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. You ever heard of the Singularity?”

“I’ve heard of it. The end of the world. Artificial intelligence. Computers taking over, or something like that.”

“You have been under a rock, haven’t you?”

“You could say that. I’m out here to get away from all that.”

“Welcome back to reality, hoss. In the past few months, it’s become one of the biggest controversies in the country. As far as how passionate people are on either side, it’s on the level of abortion or stem cell research. You can’t get through one newspaper without reading about it.”

“I haven’t looked at a newspaper in two years, man. What’s the deal with it? I did overhear someone the other day talking about some Singularity Summit they are having in Seattle.”

“Exactly. The idea of the Singularity is that technology, which is moving at an admittedly
scary
rate, will lead to the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence and the ultimate end of the human race as we know it. And by ‘smarter-than-human intelligence,’ they’re not talking about a computer who can beat a human at chess. They’re talking about a
being
—using the term loosely, evolved from our own technology—that will be able to beat us at everything in life. They could take our jobs, our girlfriends, even our lives. They could be super humans, robots, or nothing that familiar. It’s all very speculative at this point.”

He crossed his arms and leaned toward me, getting closer to his point. Though the topic was rather interesting, I was getting no closer to signing up for whatever it was he was about to ask. “Theorists say this could happen soon, like twenty-or-thirty-years soon. They say that there will be a point in time—an
event horizon
—where everything changes. A point of no return. These people, some of the smartest in the world, say that no one could possibly predict how it will come about or what will be on the other side, but that it
will
happen. That event horizon
is
the Technological Singularity, or Singularity for short. The beginning of the unknown.”

He ate a piece of Comt
é—
a cheese that can always be found in my refrigerator
—
and enjoyed it before continuing. “One of the pioneers on the AI side, Ray Kurzweil, uses the analogy of the computer he used in college at MIT back in the seventies. It was the size of a room and only a few people in the world had access to such power. Now, more than a billion people have smart phones in their pockets that are many times more powerful than that computer at MIT.”

He stuffed another piece of cheese in his mouth. “Man, that’s good.”

“I know.”

“Anyway,” he said, “Kurzweil says technology is not only getting faster, but it’s getting faster
faster
. It wasn’t that long ago that the Wright brothers flew the first airplane. Less than seventy years later—in the same lifetime for some—we put men on the moon. Where to next?”

“Who knows?” I stood and stepped up onto the stone rail, where I began to relieve myself into the grass. A coyote howled off in the distance. “As long as I can pee outside on my farm, I’ll be happy.”

“The little things in life, right? Those are what matter.”

“That’s right,” I agreed, enjoying the view.

“Like the one in your hand.”

I shook my head. “You’re never going to grow up, are you? Don’t make me—”

I was enjoying my sweet relief when Ted came up from behind and pushed me, midstream as it were, knocking me into the grass. Some things never change.

A few minutes later, we were both back in our chairs and I pulled out some whiskey. We each took a shot and Ted picked up right where he’d left off.

“Imagine this, Harper,” he said. “Seriously. In our lifetime, humans will have computers installed
in their brains
. Imagine a soldier who could access a computer just by thinking. He could see any map or speak any language without lifting a finger. Singularists say that these super humans will be the most creative artists and inventors and scientists, curing diseases that we never could, writing music that Mozart would drool over, solving environmental problems; that kind of thing. Even making ethical decisions.”

I let him keep going. “But Artificial Intelligence is just part of it. You’ve got scientists in other fields doing similar work, like geneticists trying to reconstruct DNA to fix diseases and other human vulnerabilities, like mental or physical disabilities. Or nanotechnicians trying to repair the body with millions of nanobots that you can shoot into the bloodstream. Take that same soldier and add that he doesn’t need to sleep or eat as much as a ‘regular’ human, and if he gets shot, you can fix him up with an injection and put him back in the field within minutes.”

“I had no idea you were such the intellectual.”

He shrugged. “I just know what I’ve been picking up the past couple weeks. I’m no expert, but that’s what this is about. It affects everything. Think of the Olympics. We’ll have to separate competitors into categories. I don’t think it would be fair to make one of us compete against a super human, right? Someone tweaked to have quicker reaction time, stronger muscles, less sensitivity to pain or exhaustion. It’s the steroids argument on steroids.” He laughed at his own joke.

“I’m still listening.”

Just as he’d done for so many of our missions together, Ted had laid out the backstory, and now he would dive into the specifics. And then I would say no and try to get a couple hours of sleep.

I laughed. “How the hell do you do that?”

“They drill into the skull and attach this microscopic implant—it looks like a mini-hairbrush—to the brain, wiring it to thousands of neurons, using electronic circuits of some kind. Obviously it’s way over my head.” He went back for more cheese. “They haven’t done it with a human yet, but they’ve done it with a chimp.”

“That’s impressive,” I said, still knowing his words were useless. I didn’t care if he was protecting the man who invented time travel. I wasn’t going to be involved.

“Yeah. Can you imagine?”

“So you’re protecting geeks now?”

“Well, think about it. We could spend all night listing the people and organizations that are already fighting these kinds of technological developments with every resource they have. Hell, flip on the news. It won’t take you ten seconds to find some hater out there bashing it. If these two doctors really are able to put a computer in a person’s brain, this is the biggest step yet in uniting man and machine. This terrifies people. It means that we’re not that far from creating super-than-human intelligence. People think this is the end of the world. Machines taking over. People are terrified.”