Emergence

by Hammond, Ray

  ‘This is the region we’re leasing and this is the adjacent region we’ll be treating for their benefit, as per the terms of our deal,’ Furtrado said, pointing. ‘It will take us about three years to complete phase one, the infrastructure and the resorts in the east, a further six for the forestry and agricultural developments of phase two and the entire development of the region will take upwards of thirty years. That depends on our immigration policy, the demand by would-be lessees for agricultural land and development properties, inward investment numbers, long-term ecological results and, of course, our own policy on zoning permission for outside developers.’

  Tye nodded. He’d seen this map a thousand times and he still had only one territorial worry, the same one that had cropped up when these new borders were first drawn. He put that concern aside for the moment. It was for the Russians to worry about, and he would bring it up in Moscow.

  ‘You’ve got the presents ready?’

  Furtrado smiled, reached down and pulled a small, elegantly wrapped package from among the papers on the floor. ‘Each of the leases constitutes a separate gift. I’ve had ornamental certificates of ownership made up and framed. We’ll save them right until just before the deal closes, when we might need just a little extra leverage.’

  Tye nodded. Buying the Baltic islands as inducements had been Furtrado’s idea, after his visit to Cape Verde.

  ‘They’ll probably help us on the price,’ predicted Tom. ‘But I want you to try again to extend the lease. The period is an abstract concept, so why is it so difficult for them to agree?’

  Furtrado shrugged. ‘I just can’t see us getting anywhere on that one. My people have been over it with their team a dozen times. The secretariat would not sanction anything beyond one hundred and fifty-five years. The Hong Kong deal the British did with China is providing the precedent. Other than a freehold sale – which they can’t countenance on political grounds – that’s the longest period the Constitutional Court would approve.’

  Tye sighed and drummed the fingers of his right hand on the armrest.

  ‘It’s academic for us as well, isn’t it?’ suggested Furtrado, deliberately provocative. ‘A hundred and fifty-five years will see us all out, and several more generations too. Who knows what will be happening in the middle of the twenty-second century?’

  Tye put his head on one side and considered. He swung his chair to the left so he could look straight into his senior counsellor’s face.

  ‘How old are you, Marsello?’ he asked in the semi-darkness.

  The lawyer shrugged. ‘Forty-six, forty-seven next month. Why?’

  ‘I’m three years older than you,’ replied Tye. ‘See any difference?’

  Furtrado watched as the younger-looking man gazed back at him. The question was rhetorical and both men knew it. Tye could almost be mistaken for his son.

  Tye paused, then leaned forward, his face close to Furtrado’s. ‘Do you want to join the programme?’ he asked quietly.

  The blood leaped and burned in Furtrado’s veins. He was close to the arcanum. Nobody knew for sure, but everybody in the senior executive guessed there had to be some truth in the exposé threatened by that British woman biographer. Furtrado had personally overseen the issuance of injunctions to prevent her from publishing, but now it seemed as if he might find out the truth first-hand. The lawyer swallowed but, despite his intense excitement, he was still a lawyer – nothing could be left to chance. It had to be spelled out.

  ‘You mean the gene therapy, for staying young?’ he asked for the avoidance of all possible doubt, exhibiting in his deliberate reductionism the incisiveness and determination that had made his career.

  Tye considered. He would be increasing the charmed circle by one. That would mean twenty-nine people now – including President Orlov, if Furtrado succeeded in Moscow. Tye would be parting with one of his ultimate motivational incentives, but it was worth it.

  ‘Yes, I mean the gene therapy that arrests human biological ageing – the Erasmus trials,’ confirmed Tye quietly. Behind them, they could hear Connie accepting a call.

  ‘You understand the sensitivity of this?’

  Tye needn’t have said it. Furtrado already knew more of Tom’s secrets than any other Tye executive. He was bound by attorney-client privilege, but even more so by the vast sums of money that were just starting to come his way.

  He nodded, wondering whether he should also ask the same favour on behalf of his wife. He decided not to. ‘Like everything,’ he said.

  ‘No, not like everything,’ contradicted Tye. ‘It will alter your perspective completely. I’m fifty now: by normal standards sixty-five per cent of my life would be over and that sort of realization does colour your thinking. My doctors and geneticists tell me I’ve actually used only sixteen per cent of my projected life, and the eventual figure may be even lower. You have no idea what that does to your mind. Everything seems different. To you, a one-hundred-and-fifty-year lease on this deal seems like an unimaginably long time, doesn’t it?’

  He raised his eyebrows. Then he leaned even closer to the lawyer. ‘While I’m afraid we’ll be handing the land back to them long before I’m ready to retire.’

  Furtrado stared into Tom’s clear eyes, taking in his smooth skin, the glossy hair, the glowing aura of energy and health.

  ‘Get them to agree to a lease of four hundred years and you can join the programme as soon as we get home,’ offered Tye in a whisper. ‘Then you might still be around to ensure they honour their part of the bargain – all the way to the end.’

  ‘Tom?’ Connie was standing nearby in the aisle. She bent low and whispered to her boss, although Furtrado could still make out the words.

  ‘It’s a call from Nurse Pettigrew. There’s a problem at the house.’

  *

  Calypso woke with a start and found herself alone. She had slept uninterruptedly for the first time in a week. She knew images of Tommy in a mask and gloves had been flying around in her sleeping brain, but so had recollections of Jack Hendriksen and his tenderness. And now she had a completely new agenda.

  She had sensed Jack’s arousal as he had comforted her, so she had soon pulled away and gone to wash her face before returning with a bottle of wine and two glasses.

  ‘It’ll only get left behind,’ she had explained as she handed him the corkscrew. ‘How did you know Tommy was here?’

  Jack began to explain that the island’s security system had automatically alerted him and all his staff. ‘He’s got ID and GPS locator chips in his LifeWatch,’ he said. ‘The network security system sent out an alert the moment Tommy crossed the boundary line of their house.’

  He looked up and noticed the expression on Calypso’s face as he eased out the cork. ‘It’s not just him,’ he added. ‘Those locators are all the rage this year. Everybody wants them for their kids. They’re a great safety device.’

  Calypso had felt tears welling up again. What sort of future could the boy have, locked up in that house and perpetually tagged and monitored? She had warned how such isolation might affect Tommy’s adult life. Jack had listened carefully for a while and then he moved to sit down beside her. He put his arm around her and kissed the top of her head. Neither knew what might happen next. Their first lovemaking, on Calypso’s rock, had been a spontaneous, urgent and physical episode. But there had been no promises, no suggestions of anything further and they hadn’t spoken privately since Jack had called in to say goodbye as he left for his New York vacation.

  Calypso kissed him gently in return. It felt good to have Jack here with her. As he kissed her again, it was suddenly passionate. She felt herself responding, but her emotions were jumbled. She loved the taste and the feel of him, had thought about that a lot, but she was still disturbed by the events of the evening. She pulled away and put a restraining hand on his chest.

  ‘You’re welcome to stay, Jack,’ she smiled, ‘but I don’t think I feel like . . .’

  He had nodded, knowing how u
pset she was.

  But later, lying in her bed, in his arms, her sadness had lifted and when he pulled his body away to avoid any unwelcome physical intrusion, she had laughed quietly and slipped her hands down his body.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ she whispered. ‘This might be just what the doctor ordered.’

  It was tender and deeply loving and she had cried gently again.

  She had then lain in his embrace, enjoying their closeness, aware that her lover was wide awake and staring at the ceiling.

  Eventually she raised herself on her elbow. ‘Jack?’

  He traced the outline of her breast with the back of his fingers. ‘Don’t you want to sleep?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. Then he had got up, fetched the rest of the wine, and told her the long story of Thomas Tye, his obsession with the process of ageing, and young Tommy’s unusual background. Calypso had harboured suspicions ever since first seeing both the boy and his father together, but this confirmation had shocked her.

  She now wondered what time Jack had left her, as she hadn’t heard the four-wheel’s engine. She pushed herself out of bed and checked the time. Not yet seven. She would shower and then call Connie to arrange a meeting. Maybe there was still time to persuade Tom to reverse his decision about her departure. It was the least she could do for that lonely, uniquely special child.

  The stream of hot water was loud in the shower cubicle and at first she didn’t hear her VideoMate trilling. As soon as she closed off the tap she heard its tones. She wrapped a towel around herself and skipped into the living room, assuming it was Jack. She had a huge smile on her face.

  But it was Connie Law, aboard an aircraft.

  ‘Doctor, can you go up to the house at once? Tommy’s been injured.’

  As Calypso was pulling on the white shirt she had laid out for her journey, she heard again the sound of a petrol engine in her drive.

  It wasn’t until she was seated beside Stella and on the way to the main house that she wondered why Connie had contacted her and not one of the many other doctors or specialists on the island. Calypso slipped on her viewpers, opened communications with the house itself and had a visual patched through to her.

  *

  Theresa Keane raised her eyes from her book and waved back at the diminutive figure that had appeared outside on her terrace. His visit was expected, and one of the bonuses of life on Hope Island was that, as in her Irish childhood in rural Connemara, the professor could leave the doors and windows open without fear of unwanted intrusion. She stepped out into the early-morning sunshine and took his outstretched hand.

  ‘Professor Keane, thank you for seeing me,’ said Raymond Liu, with a formal dip of his head. The American-Asian still effected this oriental courtesy even though his parents had emigrated from Hong Kong to San Francisco years before he was born. This morning he felt more than a little daunted at meeting this world-famous academic and recipient of the Nobel Prize.

  ‘It’s good to meet you, Doctor Liu. Come in.’

  The highly regarded group technical director of Tye Networks had asked to see her in person, so she had suggested this early-morning meeting before either of them started their daily schedule. She already knew his division was in crisis because of the Los Angeles traffic-management debacle; his personal assistant had made clear the urgency of his request. Even though the hastily arranged launch of two replacement satellites had restored the vehicle-management service to the city, she guessed that he was still under immense pressure to ensure no further failures. Suddenly, every computerized traffic- and mobile-asset management system in the world had become suspect.

  ‘Tea or coffee?’ she asked as she led him into her sunny living room. Pots of both were ready, with pastries and croissants laid out on a low table.

  ‘Good morning,’ said a ball of fur sitting on the arm of the sofa.

  Theresa laughed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized as she bent to stroke her CatPanion. ‘Go to sleep, Sandra.’ The Furry obediently switched to nap mode.

  Liu chose coffee and perched himself gingerly on the edge of her sofa. ‘I watched your Summer Lecture,’ he began.

  Theresa smiled. ‘A little theatrical, I’m afraid. But we need party tricks to capture young minds.’

  Liu merely nodded.

  ‘So what can I do for you?’ she asked, direct as always.

  He leaned forward and carefully returned his cup and saucer to the coffee table.

  ‘I was wondering if you’d be kind enough to tell me a little more about the activities of your agents in the networks?’

  The professor smiled again. ‘Ah yes, the Anagenesis Experiment. And you’re wondering whether they’re in any way connected with the system failures.’

  ‘I have no idea,’ admitted Liu. ‘I can’t find any common cause for the faults occurring in our systems or networks and, well, given your reputation, I’ve . . . Frankly, I need help, Professor. I have never seen anything like this in all my years as an engineer.’

  Theresa could see the desperation in his eyes. She could also guess that he hadn’t been sleeping much recently.

  ‘What happened to the LA traffic-management system, Raymond?’ she asked.

  He hesitated. At least in her he had an informed listener – possibly there was no one better qualified. But he realized she was unlikely to be fully versed in the arcane design structures of orbiting traffic-management systems.

  ‘We lost one bird,’ he began, ‘but the other was recovered. All its data processing had frozen.’

  ‘But I presume the orbiting management system would have held a back-up of the asset data?’

  ‘Precisely’

  ‘And what did they show?’ she prompted.

  ‘They showed that there had been over six hundred memory leaks on board LAT-6 in the twelve hours immediately before the system crashed.’

  ‘Memory leaks – you mean specific faults that the system registered and corrected itself?’ He nodded. ‘They wouldn’t be coding faults?’ she prompted.

  Liu shook his head. Ever since commercial software code had been generated by computers instead of humans, programming bugs had become almost non-existent and, in the case of orbiting systems, every combination of every line of code was checked and cross-checked by ad hoc computer farms made up of vast global networks of computers contracted to spend their idle time on the task. During the period that Liu and his team had been developing the software for the SATMAN systems, over two million computers had each been used for up to seven hours a day, attacking the software and presenting it with every possible combination of instructions and error situations that the computers could randomly generate.

  The system analysis and diagnostic modules had predicted the mathematical odds of six hundred memory leaks occurring within a single eight-hour period of normal orbital processing at 14.7 million to one. Liu hadn’t even bothered to compute the odds against another satellite suffering similar problems, or of the first failed satellite leaving its station without receiving instructions to do so. He’d been through that type of futile calculation over the satellite failures that had occurred in the Australasian quadrant.

  ‘No. When we refer to memory leaks we mean faults appearing in the registers without any obvious internal cause.’

  ‘Just a binary flip?’ she prompted.

  ‘That’s it,’ agreed Liu. ‘Those rare situations when a zero becomes a one and nobody knows why.’

  It was Theresa’s turn to ponder. She was making connections.

  ‘We normally put those down to magnetic radiation, don’t we?’ she mused, as much to herself as to Liu. ‘We say that a photon passed through – or a quark, a neuron, neutretto or neutrino. Loosely, a cosmic event concerning an energy particle which we don’t yet understand.’

  ‘But we shield all our systems,’ objected Liu. ‘And the magnetosphere – the magnetic force field around the earth – shields us from all the really nasty radiation of outer space.’

  The professo
r nodded and sat back and played with the Victorian silver stamp box that hung on a silver chain around her neck. ‘You’ve ruled out a virus or a hacker?’

  Liu nodded. ‘There’s definitely no virus. It wouldn’t be so random in what it affects and, anyway, we’ve combed almost every line of code we have. There’s nothing there.’

  ‘A hacker?’

  Liu started to laugh but it turned into a groan of exasperation. ‘I just can’t see how, Professor – Theresa. You should see the security systems we’ve built in. But even if somebody could break our encryption, surely we’d have received some sort of extortion demand by now. It wouldn’t be done just for fun.’

  He shook his head again, steeling himself to be blunt. ‘I saw what you’re doing with self-duplicating software agents in the networks and, well, frankly, I was wondering if your experiment could have gotten out of control.’

  Theresa nodded. She understood his concern, but she was thinking along wholly different lines. ‘I think that’s impossible, Doctor. I wouldn’t allow my students to release anything that has the potential to do harm. The only objective our agents are given is to compete in order to reproduce.’

  ‘But they are evolving?’ prompted Liu.

  ‘Yes, but only in their courtship techniques. They’re learning merely how to reproduce more efficiently, not to interact with the environment around them.’

  Liu weighed his next statement carefully. ‘Professor . . . seven hundred and eighteen people died in Los Angeles because our system failed. The Tye Corporation faces lawsuits that currently total over eight hundred billion dollars. Large-scale projects we were constructing in fourteen cities have been put on hold until we can show the consulting engineers what caused the problem, and other cities still using our traffic-management systems are panic-stricken in case they suffer a similar failure.’

  Theresa nodded, trying not to convey any hint of her alarm. She’d had no real idea of the seriousness of the situation. She rarely watched or listened to real-time news, and she read no newspapers. Years before she had made a conscious decision to forgo the experience of the present, of the here and now, of the actualité. ‘Life’s not a rehearsal’ her only serious long-term partner had once said to her. But Theresa had dismissed her remark, understanding better than most that the virtual – the essence of Theresa Keane – was not so confined, and that semi-isolation and withdrawal from the world was a wholly suitable environment for her work. Most of her thinking involved a time far in the future and, in that virtuality, there was both rehearsal and performance. Theresa’s philosophy was, of course, that of a Yogācāra Buddhist, although she would have accepted neither the label nor the limitations that implied.