by Hammond, Ray
The banker’s head was bowed and his hands were cupped around his water glass. He looked up sharply at Jack with sad eyes that seemed almost opaque, as if a veil had been drawn across them to hide their secrets.
‘Do you know anything of economics, Mr Hendriksen?’
‘Nothing would be an over-generous description.’
‘The Tye Corporation is getting so powerful we think it risks destabilizing the world’s economy,’ the banker said carefully in the same Israeli-accented gravel tones that Jack had heard so often on the news broadcasts. ‘I first raised the subject four or five years ago. We therefore did a study – created a scenario – and even then we found that if the Tye Corporation suffered just a couple of bad quarterly financial results, the whole world’s economic growth might actually turn negative. Investors would panic, millions of little traders would get hurt and the international markets would crash.’
The ‘basset hound’ sucked in his fat left cheek as he searched for the right words.
‘I concluded that it could lead to a major world recession,’ he explained. ‘But it appears my worries were ill founded at the time or, at least, I was worrying about the wrong thing. Far from failing, the Tye Corporation is now four times the size it was then. The largest corporation the world has ever seen. Its annual revenue is greater than Germany’s GDP . . .’
He shrugged. ‘Who has control over it? Not the World Bank – not any central bank, not any government. Exec Deakin is right: this has become political. My member states are uncomfortable with the current situation – the principle of laissez-faire is OK only when granted, not when appropriated. In the old days we could apply national anti-trust laws. We could fine, supervise or break up corporations when they became too big, too monopolistic, too wealthy or too powerful. Now that they’re global, we can’t do that, except in trifling ways in individual territories. There’s no such concept as antitrust regulations or anti-monopoly legislation in international law. The Tye Corporation is a rapacious, unprincipled, monopolistic, money vacuum. And with the new information Exec Deakin has shared with us . . .’ Chelouche shrugged and began to study his fingers.
Jack was puzzled. These ideas weren’t new to him. Many of the news magazines had run pieces on the same lines over the last few years, and he had been present numerous times when Thomas Tye addressed such public concerns on TV and on the platforms.
‘Always remember we’re a public corporation,’ TT would proclaim in his best shareholderese. ‘All we ask is the freedom to be creative, to innovate, to bring really great new products and services to the world at large. Our shareholders are like voters: if we get things wrong, they’ll vote via their stock portfolios.’
And so far, it seemed, Tye had done nothing to upset his elite body politic.
Amethier took his cue from the banker’s lapse into silence. ‘There’s something else, Jack, one of the main reasons we’ve dragged you here – the new information Doctor Chelouche refers to. Look at this.’
The Director of UNISA again pressed the button on his control panel. Jack looked up at the screen and saw a standard form with the heading World Patent Organization.
‘This is a patent filing, Jack. It’s from Bioneme Research, a subsidiary of the Tye Corporation. Don’t bother to read it all. The point is that there is a very, very unusual error in this document. The object of the patent is to secure the rights to a therapy produced from a string of genes, a treatment that controls human hormone production, specifically progesterone, oestrogen and testosterone.’
Amethier turned to the World Health Organization scientist who had moved along the table to take the place vacated by the Secretary-General. ‘Professor Berzin, would you like to explain?’
She bowed her greying head slightly. ‘According to that patent filing these hormones govern how humans smell. They create our individual body chemistry, Mr Hendriksen.’ She spoke with a faint East European accent and Jack guessed she was from Poland. ‘As you may know, it is now widely understood that pheromonal attraction is by far the most important component of sexual desire. To a large extent we choose our mates by how pleasing their smell is and by how different their genetic mix is from our own – we analyse this unconsciously from the body’s olfactory signature.
‘Progesterone, oestrogen and, to a lesser extent, testosterone are circulating prohormone steroids and they control how receptive myometrial cells are to oxytocin, the hormone that’s made in the brain and governs the body’s olfactory chemistry. If this string of genes can be modified and brought under control, a man or woman would be able to use a ScentSampler to analyse a desired partner’s chemistry and then construct a pheromone mix that was sufficiently similar but genetically different to enhance their chances of seduction. And, as this patent suggests, the effect would be very powerful.’
She paused and looked with a slight frown at the pen she held between her hands. ‘A therapy for these genes, say an oral DNA vaccine, would be like manufacturing a love potion naturally, inside the body.’
‘It’s got blockbuster drugs written all over it,’ interjected Deakin.
Jack smiled. He had heard Tye and his associates discussing many other such blockbusters. So many drugs and treatments seemed to be dubbed ‘miracles’ these days, he wondered why this particular one had caught their attention.
‘The point is, the genes mentioned in this patent filing don’t actually exist,’ explained the professor. ‘Or rather, they do exist in the genome, but the ones identified in this patent are silent, inactive. They’re incapable of affecting hormone or pheromone production or any other function of human physiology. They belong to the ninety per cent of gene strings that don’t seem to have a specific purpose, the non-coding or junk DNA.’
‘So, Bioneme’s researchers have screwed up?’ queried Jack, looking at the banker. ‘Is this serious enough to cause a global financial problem?’
‘Just a minute, Commander,’ broke in Amethier. ‘Take a look at this.’ He pressed the control-panel button again, and this time Jack saw a page headed Highly Confidential Memo. From the logo he could see that it was an internal document of the Pfizer-LaRoche pharmaceutical company.
Amethier highlighted a line near the top of the page. ‘This memo was written four months before Bioneme filed their patent application,’ he explained. ‘But it wasn’t written by anyone inside Pfizer-LaRoche. It was written here, by UNISA, and Ron led the project.’
Deakin grimaced and turned to his former pupil. ‘We made up that damn thing, Jack, with the help of some of Professor Berzin’s researchers.’ He looked to the WHO iatrochemist for confirmation.
‘It was the work of some very clever osphresiologists and hormonologists in my research group,’ she nodded. ‘I asked them to imagine their ultimate wonder drug. At Exec Deakin’s suggestion I asked them to identify deliberately a sequence of silent genes that we know don’t do anything in human physiology. Then they wrote an explanation of how an oral therapy might be delivered once a patent was filed and testing could begin.’
Deakin smiled and resumed the story. ‘Now listen, Jack: when it was finished we scrambled the document, using the highest level of encryption we’ve got – string lengths above a hundred megabits, Pentagon standard – and e-mailed it from the Swiss offices of Pfizer-LaRoche to their offices here in Vermont. The company was happy to help, though they didn’t know what we were doing. It was just another encrypted e-mail that came into their server, only they didn’t have the private key to open it. Nobody did, Jack. In fact, nobody does to this day, not even anybody else in this room. I myself ran the software to create the encryption keys, and I destroyed the original memo and removed every trace from the system.’
Deakin slipped a data-storage card out of his shirt pocket. ‘This is the only copy of the key that exists in the world, and I have never used it since I originally scrambled that memo.’ He sat back to see if his friend would see the implications.
Like everybody, Jack understood that super-
strong encryption was considered unbreakable. Unlike everybody, his training as a field intelligence officer had provided him with an understanding of the maths behind it. He knew that even if every scrap of computer power on the planet was connected and run as the largest parallel processing computer ever imagined, the amount of time required to discover the set of high prime numbers developed for one encryption key of such length would run into tens of thousands of years.
‘You’re saying Bioneme got hold of a plain-text copy of that memo?’ he asked incredulously.
‘There were no copies made, Jack – plain-text or otherwise. Professor Berzin’s team worked solely in my office and they took nothing away. After I sent the e-mail from Switzerland I destroyed my original plain-text file and electronically scrubbed the storage media. The only copy that exists is the encrypted document I e-mailed to Vermont.’
‘And that encryption is unbreakable,’ confirmed Jack.
Deakin turned to the British mathematician who had been silent throughout the meeting. ‘Your turn, Doctor Mathison,’ he said.
Chapter Seven
Theresa Keane walked to the centre of the stage and turned to face her audience. Every seat in the lecture theatre was taken. They were also sitting in the aisles and standing at the back. Even the floor space intended for wheelchairs in front of the low stage was filled with the upturned eager faces of people who sat hunched and cross-legged on the carpet. Volunteer stewards who were supposed to keep the fire exits clear had given up this hopeless task, and now stood facing the stage while knots of latecomers tried to squeeze in behind them through the doorways. All over the campus hundreds more would be watching the video stream.
The buzz had started in the Hope Island networks even before a formal announcement was made. Professor Theresa Keane, the Tye Corporation’s Nobel Laureate of computer science, was going to give what she billed as a ‘Summer Lecture’, her first public performance since becoming Director of Hope Island University’s School of Virtuality the year before.
Every ‘student’ on the campus of Hope Island University was actually postgraduate and many had already achieved their doctorates. A few had arrived as associate professors. Each year, the Tye Corporation’s team of human-resource scouts roamed the world’s greatest universities, seeking out the brightest and the best to make them offers they found hard to resist. It didn’t take much to seduce young computer scientists, geneticists, astrobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, cognitive scientists, physicists, chemists and mathematicians into spending a few years in the semi-tropical climate of a Caribbean island, studying with some of the world’s best brains and – even more unusual in academia – being paid handsomely to do so. Nobody claimed that Hope University offered a wide range of academic opportunities, but in the fields of the life sciences, computing and communications it was the equal of any institution in the world. Its patent record was unrivalled.
Keane’s reputation preceded her. It wasn’t just her Nobel Prize. The gossip addicts of the networks insisted that she was regarded as the most gifted lecturer MIT ever had: even better than the great Feynman, some said. At her former university the students had dropped everything when they heard she was giving a lecture and, the word was, she never needed notes, she never waffled and she always captivated her audiences.
She smiled, pleased at the turnout. ‘Good afternoon. Thank you for coming. Let’s keep the house lights up for the moment.’
She walked to the front of the low stage and paused, looking down at the press of young researchers at her feet.
‘May I?’
Those who were sitting cross-legged on the floor at the front of the pit area had to shuffle backwards on their buttocks to make room. The professor stepped down to stand amongst them, elegant in a beautifully cut olive-green trouser suit and white blouse. She smiled and lifted her arms as if about to conduct an orchestra. Every individual in the room felt contact. As one, the audience seemed to lean inwards.
‘This glorious planet, our home, is between four and five billion years old,’ she began, her soft Irish lilt lending natural melody to her words. ‘About four million years ago our distant ancestors started to lean back on their hind legs and, step by step, they began to walk in what anthropologists now call plantigrade fashion. Thus began the final part of the evolutionary process that was to lead to human beings.’
She had stooped to match her action to her words and now she slowly rose again to her full height and shielded her eyes with her hand, as if protecting them from the sun.
‘In this fully upright posture, Homo erectus tilted his head back in order to see into the distance, over the tall savannah grasses of Africa’s Rift Valley – that’s in today’s Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. This step hastened the development of vision, which has become our supreme sense. Over the countless generations that followed, gravity caused our skull to elongate, our brain started to expand in this new space and our larynx fell to the bottom of our throat.’
The professor pressed her hand to her throat and looked around at her audience. ‘Here it found room to enlarge, to grow a nervous system and become mobile. The range of sounds that it could produce expanded dramatically and thus, through language, we stumbled upon our most important ability . . .’
She paused for effect.
‘. . . The interconnection of one single intelligence with many others.
‘It was language that provided the feedback loop that sent the human brain on its runaway evolutionary progression towards the emergence of consciousness or, as I prefer, coeaesthesis or self-awareness – the general sense of existence, of immanence, that arises from the sum of bodily impressions and mental observations, the vital sense. It was language – spoken, unspoken, written, symbolic and conceptual – that was the trigger to this fantastic, accidental creation: humanity’s individual and collective virtuality.’
She had them. She smiled around the hall and held their gazes. ‘Language, and the virtuality of which it is the prime representative, was so successful as a random evolutionary excursion that, in under four million years, it achieved for the genus homo a breakthrough and a developmental spurt that had not occurred in the nearly two hundred million years during which fish, mammals and dinosaurs had rule of this solitary, lucky and almost unbelievably fecund planet.’
Her listeners were absolutely silent.
‘Language is the essence of humanity and it was the first external symbol, simulation, representation or virtual element to appear in what had been, up to that point, a totally physical world. This uniquely human form of shared consciousness began the moment humanity named itself.’
The professor leaned towards a bespectacled young man at her feet and held out her hand. ‘I am Theresa, you are . . .?’
‘R-Robert,’ he replied, with a hint of a stammer.
‘Good afternoon, Robert.’ She smiled at him and turned back to her audience.
‘We named each other and the objects in our world with abstract but mutually agreed sounds that can be taught to others in a group network. Language created humanity’s past and the present and gave it some tools with which to imagine the future – all based on virtuality, which for so long has been misunderstood by those imbued with it and erroneously expressed as spirituality or soul. We are not clever animals, ladies and gentlemen; we are primarily identities of virtuality trapped, for the moment, within physical biological containers or, as I prefer to call them, constrainers. This is our psychogenesis.’
The professor was into her stride. She explained that the Neolithic cave paintings were humanity’s first recorded form of virtual expression. She underlined how it was the agricultural revolution alone that had produced the wealth, and thus the time, that allowed humans to invent the concepts of writing and money, two of the most powerful forms of virtual information storage. And she urged them to accept the concept of digital representation, virtual existence, as a logical destination for the human species.
‘Our migration into the dig
ital networks around this planet is a natural extension of human virtuality,’ she explained. ‘By definition, humans are virtual creatures and we are at our most powerful when our habitat is also virtual.’
None of this was new to her audience. Her first best-seller, Global Virtuality, had laid the foundations of digital-age philosophy ten years earlier and it was now almost mandatory reading for undergraduates, whatever their branch of science. But they also knew she never missed an opportunity to reinforce her message. As she claimed, the virtual environment was still a very new place for the human psyche and it was always tempting to dismiss the intangible as unreal.
‘And so we come to the subject of consciousness,’ Theresa announced. ‘Some of you will know that machine consciousness has been the focus of my work in recent years.’
Some of you will know? Every one of them knew and every one of them was hoping for an update. She wasn’t going to disappoint them.
‘My reason for starting with a brief overview of human evolution is that until a few years ago we were ignoring the process, even though it was a model that had been staring us in the face all the time. For nearly forty years the field of artificial life and machine intelligence yielded nothing but disappointments. It seemed as though our efforts to build a machine that had human-type intelligence were doomed to failure. Many said we were failing because humans have qualities that can’t be captured within a machine. Others said it was because we didn’t even understand the object we were trying to copy, let alone become capable of replicating it. I believed that attempting to create consciousness as if it were a product, or a function of software code, was wrong. I believed that consciousness is something that emerges spontaneously in a given set of circumstances, probably out of immense processing density and billions of individual transactions – as in the human brain.
‘Then, about seven years ago, my team and I wondered what would happen if we applied our latest understanding of human evolution to our research. Everybody in this room will know that, as humans, we are merely the latest members of a group of eighty billion or so hominids who have so far gasped momentarily for life, reproduced and died on this planet. We are the latest models of a line of almost infinite prototypes, developed with no hint of temporal urgency or parsimony of resources and with no whiff of interest in the fate of individual experimental models to distort the process that led to our accidental but seemingly wonderful design.