Cover

Title Page

Copyright Notice

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Dedication

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE HUMAN FUTURE.

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the support of Anne Strieber, who assembled the many scientific papers and information that I have used in the creation of this story. While not presently possible, the creation of artificial intelligence and even machine consciousness will take place in the near future.

Epigraph

Biological intelligence will be viewed as merely the midwife of “real” intelligence—the powerful, scalable, adaptable, immortal sort that is characteristic of the machine realm.

—Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence

We have the right stuff now to build real brains.

—Hewlett-Packard representative The New York Times, April 8, 2010

If I was an intelligent machine, I would deceive you.

—The Master of the Key, from The Key

Prologue

PROLOGUE

DULCE

In 1974, a Ph.D. genetics expert called Thomas Ford Turner realized that very advanced technologies he was working with under conditions of extraordinary secrecy could, in time, free young Americans from the danger of serving on the battlefield. With hard work, in years to come it was going to be possible to create the perfect soldier, a complex biomechanical hybrid.

He established these criteria for his hybrid:

1. He has the general appearance of a man.

2. He is more intelligent than a man.

3. He is programmable.

4. He is more aggressive than a man.

5. He is more powerful than a man.

6. He is more durable and more hardy.

7. He is totally loyal.

8. He is a device, not a human being.

9. As a biological machine, he has no rights.

10. He does not stop unless destroyed.

Deep in an underground facility in Dulce, New Mexico, Dr. Turner began exploiting the benefits of the most secret partnership in the world, and using what he gained from it in fulfillment of his ambition.

On June 13, 1976, he began experimentation using highly accurate gene-splicing techniques that were thousands of years in advance of anything as yet designed by human science.

Ten years later to the day, the first of his hybrids was born.

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

JUNE 13, 1986