Unfortunately, it was those same resources that were making him an increasingly prominent target. For competing commercial interests. For politicians. Even for the people he wanted to help.

Ironically, it might be that latter category that would prove most dangerous in the long run. The average person had no hope of understanding the depths of someone like Nicholas Ward. His motivations. How a mind like his perceived the world. The effortlessness with which he manipulated the technologies he’d created. And what people didn’t understand they distrusted—a tendency that had been amplified a thousand times over by the Internet. It was getting hard to keep up with all the conspiracy theories that swirled around him. That he was using his medical research to track patients. That he was Q of the imaginary QAnon organization. Even that he was, in fact, some kind of lizard-human hybrid. The last one in particular would have been easy to laugh off if it weren’t for the startling number of people who subscribed to it. The belief in witches had been ridiculous, too, but that hadn’t been much comfort to the innocent people watching the flames rise around them.

Having said that, it would be very much a mistake to paint Ward as either innocent or a victim. Like the introduction to the old Star Trek television program, he was attempting to go where no man had gone before. There were risks to that kind of action. To him. And, frankly, to everyone else.

If she were to make a list of the most powerful entities in the world—the ones that would shape the next one hundred years of human existence—how would it be ordered? The United States and China would be on top, she imagined. But after that, was it possible that she’d write the name Nicholas Ward?

It was incredible that she was even asking that question. The first two entries encompassed the better part of two billion people. The last was a single man. A single man who still didn’t fully understand the power he had. One day he would, though, and she wasn’t sure what the consequences would be.

What she was sure of was that he needed to be protected. His involvement in telecom, space exploration, energy, and artificial intelligence was critical to America’s national security and economy. The rest of it—the existential danger and hope he represented—was something for another day.

21

SOUTHWESTERN UGANDA

ANOTHER perfect Ugandan day. Another helicopter ride. Another dense forest streaking by beneath Rapp’s boots. Unfortunately, it had also been a perfect day in South Africa, where he had managed to spend less than two weeks before Irene Kennedy’s courier had appeared at his gate.