Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

like graduations, weddings, and childbirth, which were recorded and saved for the day enough of the bills were finally paid that they could wake up and attempt to reassimilate.

A second way Project Overwinter attracted participants was by optionally guaranteeing anonymity. Sometimes in order to escape harmful cycles or extricate yourself from toxic relationships, it helped to disappear long enough to shift your temporal existence. But Overwinter was not to be used as a poor man’s Grid—a cryo-haven to escape paying for crimes by waiting out their statutes of limitation. Before requests to destroy biological samples and anonymize profiles were granted, thorough searches across all global most-wanted indices had to be independently verified. Of course, what administrators and legislators were still missing was the fact that with the right technology and the wrong motivation, it was perfectly feasible to commit unspeakable crimes even as you slept.

Paris being the crucible of so much cultural and scientific influence, Henrietta had decided to complete her manifesto there. The French were no strangers to crisis and had already started to move on, the city deftly routing around the Station F crater as it was being hastily hermetically capped, and politicians shifting from composed consolation and impassioned vows of swift reprisal to finding ways of using the tragedy to undermine their political rivals. Each day, Henrietta picked a different outdoor café, folding coasters into wedges to level cast-iron tables on cobblestone walks as she typed out her life’s work on a hacked CIA-issued laptop.

It is entitled Existential Threat Without Death: The Impending Permanent and Stable Global Totalitarian Dystopia. Part One argues that, for the first time in history, authoritarian regimes have everything they need to not only seize absolute power, but to retain it indefinitely, and that the greatest threat of AI was never that it might turn against us, but rather that we would figure out exactly how to master it. Part Two is a call to action—an assertion that anyone who is able has a responsibility to rise up against the primary apparatuses of total state control thinly disguised as the world’s various intelligence agencies. And Part Three gives anyone who wants it the means to do so: a library of schematics for building a wide variety of Antecedent machines—devices of all different sizes, configurations, and yields, some so discrete as to reclaim all the energy inside a sphere with the diameter of barely a centimeter, and some big enough in theory to collapse entire cities. All of them reverse engineered by recursive algorithms seeded with equations stolen from a heavily guarded and shielded cleanroom.

She uploaded her manifesto to an obscure corner of the shadowphiles, discoverable through a complex series of clues starting with a cryptic challenge posted to an anonymous, anti-government forum. In order to ensure that her work cannot be discovered and suppressed by undercover agents, some puzzles require compute power inaccessible to any single government entity. Others require recruits to collaborate across geographical regions located in countries either at war with one another or without established diplomatic relations. It is a new type of smart, decentralized bomb with a long, tamper-proof fuse. Self-interest will prove to be governments’ ultimate undoing. Just as science transcends politics, the future will belong to those who can bond across borders—a radically transformative feat achievable only by the people.

Henrietta calculates that it will take between six months and a year for all the clues to be solved and the manifesto to be uncovered. Maybe another three to six months for the first generation of Antecedent machines to be built. But even though it will be some time before the world realizes that The Static was somehow leaked, Henrietta knows that she needs to disappear now.

Kilonova was not built for the benefit of other timelines. The CIA has no intention of idly waiting for terrorist attacks to accumulate, then bundling names up into tidy blockchains and gravitationally transmitting them into the past. Moretti built a time machine because of Henrietta’s theory that its mere existence would increase the probability of names appearing in the present—names that, theoretically, Kilonova will send back sometime in the future. He initially wanted her to build a machine that could send particles back in time; accelerate them beyond the speed of light; control their spins so they could be encoded as bits. But superluminal technology did not yet exist. What she might be able to do, she explained to him—given enough mass and power—was cause infinitesimal perturbations in spacetime. Modulate both wavelength and amplitude to double temporal throughput. The second they broke ground on Kilonova, the AI Henrietta trained to find patterns in the particle detector backlogs at the Large Hadron Collider was deployed to monitor the four most sensitive gravitational wave detectors on the planet.

Which means the moment her plan reaches a certain threshold of quantum determinism, she has to assume that Moretti will know. In fact, the more likely it is to succeed, the greater the chances are that the second Epoch Index will spontaneously appear. And an audit of cleanroom logs will almost certainly surface one distinct anomaly: Henrietta Yi, a Korean American CIA researcher granted special dispensation by Jean-Baptiste Allard. It’s even possible that her name will be revealed to Quinn and Ranveer as the final block in the assassination chain.

If only she’d known where all this was going. If a younger version of herself could have at least conceived of this possibility. She could have built in a remote kill switch. Or made structural changes to the containment chamber so that, when the gravity spheres reached maximum rotational speed, the whole thing would shatter. All that mass would fall and the entire structure collapse. Alessandro Moretti, eventually found dead, crushed to death in his man cave turned crypt. But instead, in some ways, Henrietta has laid her own trap. Like so many of the obstacles we face throughout our lives, the result of oblivious yet insidious plots conceived by our former selves.

In retrospect, the appearance of the