Wired - Douglas E. Richards [72]
Desh shook his head. “I think we’re probably in the clear,” he said. “If they haven’t found us by now, they’ll have moved on. They’ll never believe we’d do something as stupid as making sitting ducks of ourselves—literally—in the middle of a busy restaurant.”
“Stupid like a fox,” said Kira with a twinkle in her eye.
Desh smiled. He lifted a large slice of pizza and gestured to Kira. “By all means, continue,” he said. “You left off when your boss turned up dead.”
Kira gathered herself and resumed her narrative. “After the break-in, Morgan’s death, and discovering the listening devices, I became more secretive than ever. I routinely swept for listening devices and I performed all animal experiments in my condo rather than at NeuroCure’s facilities.” She paused. “I worked on both of my primary goals at the same time, but I achieved the leap forward in neuronal optimization first.”
“How long after the break-in?” he asked.
“About nine months.”
“I assume you tested it to be sure it worked.”
“Yes. I engineered a batch with an exceedingly short half-life in case there were complications. I was only in this state of super-optimization for about two seconds, but it was enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough to be certain I’d succeeded. Those two seconds felt like five minutes. The first level of optimization is beyond description. The second level is beyond imagination.” Her eyes widened in wonder. “It was a transcendent level of thought. Awe-inspiring. So much so that I was afraid to ever try it again.”
This time Desh knew only too well what she meant. Once again, she had been afraid of the corrupting influences of untold power.
“The lower dose was having a cumulative effect,” continued Kira. “The more I transformed myself the greater my tendency to embrace the idea of ruthlessly selfish behavior. My emotional side became ever more suppressed, and my feelings of superiority continued to increase. It’s hard enough retaining the vestiges of altruism when you become convinced there is no afterlife. And when you’re powerful enough to do whatever you want. It’s even worse when you begin to see normal human intelligence as pathetically insignificant.” She looked troubled. “If this was how I began to view humanity when optimized to the first level, how would I view our species if I spent more than two seconds at an even more elevated level?”
Desh continued eating as she spoke but he was quickly losing his appetite. Was there really a plane of intelligence so elevated that normal human intelligence didn’t register? He killed insects without much thought. Beings whose intelligence was as far beyond human intelligence as his was beyond an insect couldn’t be blamed for indifference to human life, or even active slaughter of any human that stood in their way.
God as ruthless sociopath?
Or was God, despite infinite power and intelligence, the one exception to the “absolute power corrupts absolutely” rule? Even assuming everything in the bible was completely true, the answer to this question was not obvious. Religions that would be appalled at a characterization of God as anything but a loving father readily accepted that He had wiped all life from the planet, save for two members from each species, simply because He was annoyed at humanity’s bad behavior.
Desh pulled himself from his brief reverie and considered the woman in front of him, whose large, expressive blue eyes continued to act as black holes, drawing him into their irresistible gravity wells, defying his every effort at resistance. He needed to stay objective. It was time to get at the heart of the matter. “You’re very good,” said Desh. “I’ll give you that. But before you go any further I’d like to back up. I want you to explain the deaths of your parents and uncle. And the murder of one of your teachers and the disappearance of another.”
She frowned and shook her head. “My parents and uncle died in accidents. As far as the teachers go, I have no idea what happened to them. But I had nothing to do with it.”
“So you acknowledge that one disappeared