by John Akers
Alethia walked over to one of the disks and sat down on it. Pax went and sat on the other one. The feeling was similar to sitting in the knife cycle—the disk adjusted its position to counterbalance his weight and motion perfectly. Pax felt his feet settle comfortably on the floor. After he sat, he casually swept one leg around underneath the table, trying to find whatever was holding it up, but his leg found nothing but air.
“Ten thousand years ago—” Alethia began, but Pax suddenly held up his hand and said, “Stop.”
Alethia said, “Is something wrong?”
Pax nodded and said, “Yes. I want some answers. And no more waiting. Now. What’s going on here? The technology you’ve shown me is amazing, but where are you going with all this? You didn’t just bring me out here to give me a fancy history lesson. What’s the point of all this?”
“We’re getting to the point, Mr. Pax,” Alethia said curtly. “Trust me, I have no desire to waste time either. Believe it or not, I want to get through this even more than you do.”
“I seriously doubt that. And you can believe me that whatever it is you want from me, I won’t agree to until I have a better idea of who I’m dealing with. Starting with you.”
“What do you mean? You want me to tell you…“
“About you. Who you are, where you come from, why you’re here. And after that, what this society of yours is about, and what it is you all want from me.”
Pax half expected her to get angry, but to his surprise, he saw a flicker of anxiety pass over her face instead.
“I understand why you want answers to those questions,” she said slowly, “but I was planning to answer them later. There is an increasing urgency to getting through the rest of what we’ve got to show you now. But, I suppose…” She gave a strange look off to one side for a moment, then refocused on Pax and said, “I suppose I can answer some of those questions now, if you’d prefer.”
“I do.”
“All right. So, you want to know more about me?”
“Yes. Let’s start there.”
“All right, Mr. Pax,” she said with a look of resignation. “I’ll tell you my story.”
Chapter 44
Sunday, 7:45 AM PT
To Cevis’ surprise, he could find hardly any information about the Ludibrium in the ShipSearch database. There was no point of origin specified, no destination, and for captain, it simply said “Ludibrium.” However, the scarcity of information only solidified Cevis’ suspicion that it had been used as a means of escape by the people who had kidnapped Oreste.
“Call the San Diego Port Authority,” he said to Cyrus. A moment later a gravely, worn voice answered, “Port Authority.”
“Hello, I’m looking for information on a ship that docked there briefly Friday night and then left in the very early hours Saturday morning,” said Cevis.
“Name?”
“The Ludibrium.”
“Howdya spell that?”
“L—U—D—I—B—”
“Oh, yeah, I remember. Big ship, came in around 10, left just a few hours later.”
“I can’t seem to find any information about its port of origin or destination,” said Cevis.
“She said it was her maiden voyage, came from a private port of origin. No cap’n either. Fully automated, just like them damn cars.” The voice on the other end grumbled for a bit about the evils of automation.
“Was there any information about the owner?” asked Cevis.
“Naw. Said it wadn’t transporting any cargo and wadn’t traveling internationally. It ain’t required to provide a manifest if yer stayin’ stateside so I didn’t bother asking fer one. We get a lotta rich celebrity types from L.A. or Silicon Valley who wanna keep a low profile, so I jus’ left it alone.”
“Did she happen to say where she was headed?” Cevis asked.
“Nah, and they stopped broadcasting their location soon after they left.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” asked Cevis.
“Nah. It’s a good idea to stay in touch in case you run into any troubles, but it’s not requi—” The voice paused. “Say, who’m I talking to anyway?”
Cevis hung up.
He drummed his fingers on the desktop. Regardless of which direction the Ludibrium had gone, Cevis knew the only way he could track the ship in the time he had available was through publicly accessible marine device networks. He knew the nearby Scripps Oceanographic Research Institute, in conjunction with other universities and research institutes around the world, maintained a worldwide network of fixed platform buoys, drifter buoys, and torpedo drones. He also knew it was just one of many such networks. He did a quick search and found an organization called the Joint Commission for Oceanography and Marine Meteorology. JCOMM coordinated the data collection from marine technology worldwide.
Cevis quickly honed in on one network, the Data Buoy Cooperation Network, which provided access to data from a wide variety of buoy networks. He was pleased to discover the DCBN network was quite dense. There was some sort of buoy or torpedo drone at least every five square miles. Most of them were meteorological, tracking water and air temperature, wind speed, wave height, sea level, ocean circulation, salinity, and so on. A few tracked the movement patterns of animals or ocean waste, using sonar-based, passive acoustic listening devices. Most importantly for Cevis’, the majority of the buoys had two to four SuperHD cameras mounted on them.
Cevis directed Cyrus to track the Ludibrium using images taken from buoys in the DBCN. But while the DBCN maps showed the location and ownership of every buoy in the network, the buoys were owned and managed by different organizations, so the information was spread across multiple databases. Most frustrating of all, they lacked CHUI interface protocols, so Cyrus was unable to communicate with them directly.
Cevis didn’t panic. Instead, he focused all his attention on the next step, which was to begin querying the databases manually. He selected a fixed platform buoy located about a mile from the marina that had four cameras, all with night vision mode. He opened its image database. It turned out the cameras all took one picture a minute. Cevis scrolled around until he found four images taken Saturday at 3:15 a.m. and opened them. The one facing south had a clear shot of the Ludibrium.
“Cyrus, mark the location of the ship based on this image.”
“Yes, sir,” said Cyrus. In the background, Cyrus used the information about the boat’s size from the ShipSearch database to process the image and determine the boat’s approximate location in relation to the camera. Then he used the camera’s geolocation and orientation at the time of the picture to determine the boat’s location on the ocean. It overlaid a white dot marking its location on the buoy network map.
Cevis selected another buoy located two miles west of the white dot. This one was from a different network and turned out to be a drifter buoy with only two cameras that took images every three minutes. Cevis found two images taken at 3:22 a.m. and opened them, but unfortunately, the cameras were facing north and south at the time the picture was taken. He jumped ahead to the pictures taken at 3:25 a.m. The camera directions had shifted to a northeast/southwest orientation, but still, there was no image of a boat. In the next two images from 3:28 a.m., the cameras were close to a west-east orientation, and this time Cevis was able to spot the boat from the image taken by the camera facing west. He was surprised how far away it was.
“Cyrus…“ he began.
“I’m determining the location of the ship now,” said Cyrus. Soon another white dot appeared on the map, three miles west of the first dot.
Cevis continued searching manually, now trying jumps of five miles at a time. After three more times, the line of white dots remained very straight, and Cyrus offered to take over. This sped things up considerably, but to Cevis it still felt like hunting for a needle in a haystack with a pair of tweezers. A couple of times Cyrus needed Cevis’ help, to determine whether a blob in the images was the boat or not. In one case, it was, but in the other case, it w
as just a strange artifact in the image.
On average, it took Cyrus five minutes to find the next image of the ship. After an hour, there were 12 dots on the map. Despite the north-south variations, the line as a whole remained true, pointing slightly above due west.
Cocky bastards. Not even trying to shake anyone who might be following them.
“Try making jumps of 25 miles at a time,” said Cevis. He was pleased to find Cyrus was still able to track the ship, although it took him closer to 8 or 9 minutes to find the next image. Cevis then had Cyrus try 50-mile jumps but found there was just enough north-south variation in the ship’s path that it took longer to find the next image than it did to make two 25-mile jumps. So Cevis had Cyrus stick with 25-mile jumps after that.
As he watched Cyrus track the ship, Cevis did a quick calculation and discovered the ship was moving almost 100 mph. Cevis’ eyes grew wide. He checked to see what speeds the fastest yachts in the world traveled. When he saw the Ludibrium was sailing fully twice as fast as any other ship had ever gone before, his eyes grew even wider. He leaned back in his chair.
Who were these people?
For the first time, Cevis realized he might not be dealing with the subterranean intellects with which he was accustomed. The thought was troubling.
For more than four hours, they tracked the ship. A couple of times, Cyrus had to fall back to jumps of 10 miles before he could pick up the trail again, but overall, he made steady progress. Cevis found it reminiscent of lab work—an unglamorous, boring grind 99 percent of the time, punctuated with occasional moments of drama.
Although it had been far from trivial, the relative ease with which he’d been able to track the ship worried him. In addition to the technology powering the ship, it wouldn’t have been a trivial matter to break into Pax’s home and abduct him. Clearly, the people responsible knew what they were doing, so they would certainly know the ship could be tracked going the way they were. It shouldn’t be this easy.
Then, after Cyrus had tracked the ship 2,000 miles west of San Diego and 500 miles northwest of Hawaii, it happened. The ship disappeared.
When Cyrus couldn’t locate another image of the ship from any buoys near the standard 25-mile jump, Cevis had him fall back to a 10-mile jump, then a 5-mile jump, before he found another image. But from that point on, he couldn’t locate another buoy with an image of the Ludibrium.
“Look at the next image taken from the same buoy that we got the last image from,” said Cevis. Cyrus did as instructed and found an image taken three minutes after the previous one. The ship had barely moved from its previous location.
Cevis wondered if the ship had possibly run out of fuel, or if Oreste had somehow managed to stop its progress. He had Cyrus scan the images forward five minutes at a time, until he came to a picture taken at 3:52 a.m. Cevis noticed the stern lights in this image seemed to be lower than before. In an image taken five minutes later, it was clear both the stern and masthead lights were noticeably lower. In an image five minutes later, the stern lights were gone. Five minutes after that, the masthead light had disappeared as well.
The ship had sunk.
Cevis’ first thought was that the only person he’d ever called a friend might have somehow drowned in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Then he shoved the useless thought aside. Something wasn’t right. He had to think.
These weren't run of the mill criminals. Until now, they hadn’t bothered to make a single, evasive maneuver. Weather-wise they’d picked a perfect time to travel. Whoever had taken Oreste had planned this event meticulously. Whatever had happened to the ship, Cevis was certain it had been intentional.
Perhaps they had simply changed their mode of transportation. It was dark, and it would be possible to make a transfer without being seen. But simply transferring to a different ship didn’t make sense. Eventually, it too would be found on the network. A nighttime rendezvous with a seaplane or helicopter was a possibility, but at that hour they wouldn’t have made it to Hawaii before daylight when they would have been detected.
That left a submersible, and immediately Cevis knew that was the answer. The deep ocean was the only place on Earth the omnipresent surveillance network did not reach, and although it would have been complicated to do a nighttime transfer, it made sense. They could have transferred Oreste to a submarine, sunk the ship to throw off anyone on their trail, then traveled to Hawaii, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, or wherever they wanted.
Cevis did some quick searches to verify there were no publicly accessible deep-sea tracking networks. The U.S. government most likely had some degree of deep-water monitoring, but any data they had would be inaccessible to him in the timeframe in which he needed it. He put his head in his hands and wracked his brain for a way to move forward. He was sure he had traced the Ludibrium to its last location, but now, to his amazement, he couldn’t think of what to do next. He simply didn’t have the information he needed to continue his pursuit, and there was no way to get it.
For the first time in his life, Cevis Pierson was stumped.
Chapter 45
Monday, March 19, 11:08 AM ET
Oreste Pax, Founder and CEO of Omnitech, Missing
The New York Times (nytimes.com)
By Donald Hirsch in New York
This morning, Oreste Pax, CEO and founder of Omnitech Industries, was reported missing. The San Diego police department said Pax’s personal assistant, Emma Kirkland, called at approximately 7:15 a.m. to say no one at Omnitech had seen or heard from Mr. Pax since late Friday afternoon. The FBI was immediately notified and is now leading the investigation into Mr. Pax’s whereabouts. Of particular concern for investigators was the fact that Mr. Pax’s Univiz appears to have been offline the entire time, raising the question as to whether he might have been kidnapped or injured.
Mr. Pax rose to fame nearly a decade ago after he invented the Univiz, the device that revolutionized personal computing by enabling users to seamlessly switch between virtual and augmented reality environments, while also being fashionable enough to wear all the time. It also revolutionized computer security with its simultaneous, multi-factor biometric screening which to this day has never been broken.
The Univiz became the fastest-growing and most profitable consumer electronics device of all-time, quickly displacing mobile phones, laptops, and desktop computers as consumers’ computer of choice. Just this week Omnitech Industries became the largest company in the world in terms of market share. However, Mr. Pax’s disappearance has already resulted in a 15 percent drop in the company’s stock price, as speculation regarding his health and whereabouts have run rampant.
Omnitech Industries has offered a $250,000 reward to anyone with material information about Mr. Pax’s whereabouts and has set up the following hotline for people to call if they have any information they believe could be relevant: 800-928-13xx.
Chapter 46
“My name is Alethia Exley,” said Alethia. “My father was a French surgeon, and my mother was an Egyptian history professor. Both my parents came from wealthy families, and we had residences in both London and Cairo, as well as a vacation home in Malta. In my youth, my father spent most of his time at the hospital or on the golf course, so I grew up close to my mother. I expected to follow in her footsteps and become a history professor, or perhaps an archaeologist, and I immersed myself in the study of history and archaeology for most of my youth.
“However, when I was a teenager my mother had an affair, and soon after, my parents divorced. I felt my mother had committed an unspeakable sin against both my father and me, and at my insistence, I went to live with my father. My decision, I learned years later, broke my mother’s heart. Her affair wound up being just a temporary thing, and she never remarried. My father, on the other hand, began dating another woman within a month after he and my mother separated, and he remarried less than six months later.
“Eventually, I decided to pursue a career in science instead of history. I attended the Sw
iss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, one of the top technical universities in the world, and graduated seven years later with a Ph.D. in bioengineering.
“After school, I accepted a job with a top biotech firm in the United States. My career progressed rapidly, and by the time I was 30, I was made an Engineering Fellow and put in charge of an R&D team responsible for one of the company’s most promising new drug concepts. Initially, the team responded well to my leadership and we made rapid, exciting progress. There was even talk of my being made the youngest-ever vice-president of the company. In other words, life was good.
“Then, the project hit an unexpected snag. After passing two rounds of clinical trials, results in the final round showed possible long-term organ damage, along with several other potentially serious side effects. I firmly believed in the Hippocratic oath of “do no harm,” and so, despite my disappointment, I recommended to upper management that we go back to the drawing board.
“However, this was not what the company’s executive team and board of directors wanted to hear. The executive vice-president of all R&D said the negative results from the third round of trials weren’t conclusive, and he pushed me to request FDA approval for market trials. Although I was the senior scientist on the project, I was young and intimidated by the older, mostly male, executive team. The EVP of R&D, in particular, threatened retribution if I persisted in recommending the project be restarted. I was told to get on board or risk being removed from the project and demoted. He also insinuated he would write a negative review of me on my professional profile, ensuring I’d never work at a top organization or university again. In the end, I relented and agreed to push the program forward.