PART 2 – THE DAY

CHAPTER 1 - A NEW POWER

Alex Jacobson, a frail blond in his early thirties, sat by the computer. Drinking his third coffee, he observed in disbelief the graphs displayed on the monitors. His face went even whiter than usual as he realized what he saw.

"It's impossible! How could that possibly happen?" he gasped, staring at the screen.

"What's happening?" a middle-aged man, sitting right by the computer expert, asked.

"All readings are off the scale!" Alex said nervously. "There is a massive data exchange, the traffic consumes the whole bandwidth."

"Alex, what's happening?" The man asked with distinct impatience.

"Everett, you're not going to believe this. Damn, even I can hardly believe in what I'm seeing right now."

"Shoot."

"Everett, they're merging."

"What!"

"The readings are unambiguous." Alex said, observing them with increasing fascination. "Look here," he continued, pointing at one of the graphs. "The amount of traffic starts decreasing now. It seems that the critical part of the process is complete. All systems are still functional. Now it's just a matter of seconds…"

Morgan Everett wasn't listening anymore. All of his plans failed. Everything supposed to look different, but his work failed instead. Now he had to form an entirely new plan.

The data exchange was slowing down and both men watched in silence, as the graph went flat.

"It is complete" Alex said mechanically, staring at the graph.

Suddenly the monitors went black. The blond blinked.

"What was that!" Everett asked anxiously.

"I guess that Helios killed our connection" the computer expert answered.

Morgan Everett shook his head in disbelief and left the computer room in order to get some sleep. Alex glanced nervously towards him and, as soon as he closed the door, he turned back to the computer.

Jacobson's fingers were dancing over the keyboard as he tried to re-establish the connection, but his attempts proved futile – the infolink wasn't responding.

"Damn!"

To his surprise, a blinking icon in the right lower corner of the screen announced two incoming messages. Alex checked his e-mail and found out that one of the messages is encrypted and the second one isn't signed.

"Interesting."

He was absolutely sure that the encrypted message came from Tracer Tong. Once again Alex threw a nervous glance at the door and making sure no one is coming, he started decrypting the message. As he finished, he read the message.

Alex,
We both know what happened. We have to be careful. Watch out for Everett. Although the matters took an disadvantageous course for the Illuminati, we must not underestimate him.
I'm not sure how long this encryption will be useful to us. Helios will decrypt it probably sooner than later, so I'd advise you to – until we find a new method – contact me only when absolutely necessary.

T. T.

The man immediately deleted the message and read the second e-mail.

Alex Jacobson,
The JC Denton you knew is no more. Do not try to re-establish contact.


On another continent two men – one Chinese and one American, observed the computer screens as well.

"The roles have changed, Savage" the Chinese said. "Now we will be observed, instead of him. The grip of global control has tightened now in greater extent than ever before."

"Yes," Savage agreed, "But on the other hand, Tracer, I doubt your idea would do any good."

"It would!" Tracer Tong retorted furiously "It would end the global control, give back the power to the people, instead of few individuals."

"It would bring even more chaos and destruction in the first place" the American disagreed. "This world is already on the verge of collapse and a sudden lack of control could destroy it. I think Denton was well aware of that."

"Do you want to tell me that you support his decision?" the Chinese stared at Savage in disbelief.

"No. All I want to say is that there was no right option. And I don't think that Denton didn't have any doubts. Augmented or not, he is still human…"

"You mean, he was human…" Tong interrupted bitterly. "Although I devoted my life to technological research, a thought that an AI entity would run this planet fills me with dread."

"An AI entity merged with a human being. That's a big difference, Tracer. Now that it happened, I would suggest that we look further into this… thing. Not that we have another choice, really."

"Maybe you're right, Savage. Maybe you're right..."

The network came to life.

The streams of information flowed from Area 51 in all directions, simultaneously with the responses coming back from all over the network. This peculiar circulation never stopped. There was much to be done in order to protect humans from their own destructive instincts.

But there was also much to learn. The network provided plenty of information, but still understanding humans was a much more difficult task than Helios initially expected. Even with the help of its human part it still couldn't understand all of the nuances of human nature.

It has grown, but there was still much to be done.