The safe room beneath the Capitol felt like a coffin.
Huey Long groaned on the floor, wiping blood from his nose with a silk handkerchief.
"My head feels like it was kicked by a mule," Long muttered. He looked up at Jason, then at Hoover. "Am I dead? Is this Hell? Because looking at you two together, it certainly feels like eternal punishment."
"You're alive, Senator," Jason said, checking Long's pupils. "They tried to fry your brain with a focused ultrasound signal. Gates didn't want a martyr. He wanted a stroke victim."
"Gates?" Hoover asked, pacing the small room like a caged animal. "The computer man? Apex Industries?"
"He's running the Senate," Sarah said. She laid a blueprint on the table—the map they had stolen from the lighthouse. "Look at the network nodes. The Capitol. The White House. The Pentagon."
She pointed to a large red circle in the center of the map.
"The Smithsonian Castle," Sarah said. "That's the hub. That's where the signal originates."
Hoover stopped pacing.
"The Castle? I have reports of strange activity there. Trucks arriving at night. Massive power spikes. I thought they were installing a new exhibit."
"They are," Jason said. "A server farm. A biological CPU running the East Coast."
"We have to raid it," Hoover said, reaching for a telephone. "I can assemble a task force of uncompromised agents..."
"You don't have uncompromised agents," Jason cut him off. "Gates has been implanting the police and the military for months. If you call anyone, they'll just wait for us at the door."
Hoover slammed the receiver down. He looked small. Defeated. For a man whose power relied on knowing everyone's secrets, being blind was a fate worse than death.
"Then what do we do?" Hoover asked. "Surrender?"
"We crash the system," Jason said. He pulled the cracked iPhone from his pocket. He had wired it to a heavy car battery and a bundle of copper leads.
"This is the source code," Jason lied (it was easier than explaining time travel). "Sarah wrote a logic bomb. A fractal paradox loop. If I can plug this directly into the central processor at the Smithsonian, it will feed a command into the network that can't be computed."
"Like dividing by zero?" Long asked, struggling to his feet.
"Like screaming into a microphone until the speakers blow out," Jason said. "It will fry the wet-ware interfaces. It will wake up the Processors. Or kill them. I don't know which."
"It's a risk," Sarah warned. "But it's the only way to stop the vote."
"We can't just walk into the Smithsonian," Hoover said. "It's guarded by the National Guard. My reports say two companies."
"Processors?" Jason asked.
"Every one of them."
"Robots are predictable," Long said, smoothing his rumpled suit. A gleam returned to his eyes. "They follow logic. They don't understand chaos."
He grinned. It was a politician's grin—sharp and dangerous.
"You need a distraction to get inside?" Long asked. "Leave that to the Kingfish."
The National Mall was dark. The Smithsonian Castle loomed like a medieval fortress, its red sandstone towers black against the night sky.
A perimeter of soldiers stood guard. They were perfectly still. Rifles held at port arms. Eyes staring forward.
Suddenly, a spotlight clicked on.
Standing on a wooden crate in the middle of the Mall, fifty yards from the castle gate, was Huey Long.
He held a megaphone.
"FRIENDS! ROMANS! COUNTRYMEN!" Long bellowed. His voice echoed off the museums. "AND YOU POOR, DUMB BASTARDS IN UNIFORM!"
The soldiers turned their heads in unison. A mechanical ripple.
"They tell you to obey!" Long shouted, waving his arms. "They tell you to march! But I say every man is a King! And no King takes orders from a machine!"
A crowd began to gather. Regular citizens, drawn by the noise. The Processors twitched. Their programming was struggling. Threat assessment: Civil Unrest. Protocol: Contain.
But Long kept moving, kept shouting, throwing insults and rhetoric like grenades. He was creating a human chaotic variable.
"Now!" Jason whispered.
While the guards focused on Long, Jason and Hoover slipped through the shadows to the side of the Castle.
They found the old coal chute. Hoover pried the grate open with his shotgun barrel.
They slid down into the darkness.
The basement of the Smithsonian smelled of coal dust and formaldehyde.
They moved up the stairs into the main hall.
Jason stopped.
"My God," he whispered.
The Great Hall of the Smithsonian, usually filled with fossils and artifacts, had been transformed.
The dinosaur skeletons were still there. But they had been modified.
The Diplodocus was wrapped in thick copper cables. The T-Rex had a surveillance camera mounted in its empty eye socket, scanning the room.
And in the center of the hall, where the elephant usually stood, was the Processor.
It was a massive glass tank, ten feet tall. Filled with a translucent blue fluid.
Floating inside wasn't a man. It was a brain.
A massive, gray mass of tissue, seemingly grown or fused from multiple sources, pulsing with light. Wires plugged into it like needles.
"The Factory of Souls," Hoover whispered, crossing himself.
"It's a biological CPU," Jason said, fighting the urge to vomit. "Gates grew a hard drive."
He ran to the base of the tank. There was a control console—a mess of brass levers and input ports.
"Cover me," Jason said.
He placed the iPhone battery rig on the console. He jammed the copper leads into the input jacks.
CRACKLE.
The fluid in the tank bubbled. The brain pulsed angrily.
A screen above the console flickered to life. Gates's face appeared. Pixelated. Distorted.
"Prentice," Gates's voice boomed through the hall. "You are obsolete. The flesh is weak."
"Flesh heals," Jason said, flipping the switch on the battery. "Machines just break."
He hit the execution command on the phone's cracked screen.
UPLOADING: LOGIC_BOMB.EXE
The tank began to vibrate.
"Error," Gates droned. "Syntax invalid. Recursion detected. Stop."
"Too late," Jason said.
The fluid began to boil. The brain turned a sickly black color.
A scream tore through the air. Not from the machine. From outside.
It was a collective scream. Thousands of voices crying out at once.
The feedback loop was hitting every Processor in D.C. simultaneously.
ZZZZZT-POP!
The tank exploded.
Glass shards and blue slime showered the hall. The brain collapsed into a pile of necrotic sludge.
The T-Rex camera sparked and died. The lights flickered and went out.
Silence returned to the Castle.
Jason and Hoover stumbled out the front doors into the dawn light.
The scene on the Mall was apocalyptic.
The soldiers were on the ground. Some were unconscious. Others were seizing.
Huey Long was wandering among them, looking horrified.
"They just... dropped," Long said. "Like puppets with cut strings."
Jason checked a soldier's pulse. "Alive. But the implants burned out. They'll have brain damage. Or they'll be free. Hard to say."
Hoover looked at the chaos. The Capitol dome shone pink in the sunrise.
"You saved the country, Prentice," Hoover said quietly. He holstered his shotgun.
"I just rebooted it," Jason said. "The virus is gone. But the system is still broken."
Hoover looked at him. His eyes were hard again. The paranoia was returning.
"Get out of here," Hoover said. "Before I remember that you're a fugitive who nuked New Mexico."
"A pleasure, J. Edgar."
Jason turned to leave.
A newspaper blew across the grass, catching on his leg.
Jason picked it up. It was a special morning edition, printed before the crash.
PRESIDENT WILSON DEAD.
STROKE CLAIMS COMMANDER IN CHIEF.
MILITARY COMMAND IN DISARRAY.
Jason looked at the headline, then at the unconscious soldiers.
"The government has fallen," Jason realized.
Gates was gone from D.C. But he had left a vacuum.
There was no President. The military was broken. The police were comatose.
Jason looked at Hoover and Long. The Authoritarian and the Populist.
They weren't allies anymore. They were rivals for the throne.
"The Second Civil War just started," Jason whispered. "And I need to get back to the sky."