by Hammond, Ray
As the planners of this mission had guessed, the whole room was a shrine to computers – a throwback to the days when Tye had actually understood something about current computer technology and, perhaps more tellingly, had still cared. Jack saw a dozen outdated super-RAID storage racks and he estimated there were seven or eight processing systems in the room. All the monitors and the large wall screen were on stand-by. As Al Lynch had predicted, there would be petabytes of data contained here. But if you wanted to find something in particular, you wouldn’t know where to begin.
‘That’s his desk.’ Jack indicated it to Tommy, wondering, as he did so, why he was whispering.
Tommy seemed afraid, unwilling to move.
Jack smiled and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
‘Come on, let’s put the birthday card where he’ll spot it easily.’ He led Tommy over to the main work surface. Beyond lay a personal Holo-Theater, now in darkness.
Tommy took the envelope and placed it centrally on the desk top.
‘I’ve brought a card for him as well,’ said Jack as he pulled a small waterproof wallet from the envelope. He broke the seal and extracted the memory card that Al Lynch had prepared specially for him. ‘It doesn’t matter which storage slot you use.’ Lynch had advised.
Jack looked around and the only slot he could see was on a control panel in the rack of old RAID storage drives. He crossed and slipped the wafer-thin card into the slot. ‘It will eject itself when it’s done,’ Lynch had continued. ‘I’ve automated everything, so you just add your message.’
The wall screen came to life and Jack was looking at himself ‘Hi, Tom,’ smiled a relaxed-looking Jack, videoed standing on his small balcony overlooking the marina at Hope Town. ‘Hope you’ve had a great time in Moscow. Happy birthday and I’m sure we’ll be meeting as soon as you get home. Take care of the planet – you hear!’ Jack’s image then raised a glass of champagne to the camera, with the sound of ‘Happy Birthday’ sung by children being played over the slow fade.
Jed started to join in, then Tommy too was singing along. The clip ended as the small voices trailed off.
‘Hurrah,’ cried Jed, unable to clap.
Jack looked at his storage card, which was still firmly engaged. He carefully positioned himself between the caterpillar and the rack, to block Jed’s view of the system. He knew that if Jed’s vision sensors captured images of the control panel and its LED status lights, they would realize later that Jack had been copying data.
‘Do you want to see it again?’ asked Jack, trying to buy time and wondering if he could get a replay without resetting the memory card. At that moment the memory card popped out of its slot, behind him.
‘No, it’s late, we’d better get back,’ Jack corrected himself. ‘Come on, Tommy.’
He retrieved the memory card and held the door open for Tommy and Jed.
The elevator required no security clearance to descend and Jack escorted Tommy back to his bedroom.
‘Time for bed now, I should think,’ he suggested as he held the door open.
‘I’m not tired,’ protested Tommy. ‘I don’t need to go to bed. I just rest and dream sometimes.’
‘Anything you want before I go?’ asked Jack.
‘No, thanks,’ said Tommy as he set Jed down carefully on the bed. He opened the door to his bedside cupboard and a light came on. Jack saw that he had been provided with his own mini-fridge. ‘I’ll just have a fruit juice.’
‘OK. Well, good night,’ Jack said softly, opening the door.
‘’Night,’ replied Tommy as he climbed back into his HydraChair.
‘Goodnight, Jack,’ called Jed from the bed.
Jack closed the door silently, wondering whether they would talk about him.
*
Connie was asleep in one of the antique four-poster beds the Tye Corporation’s Russian hosts had refurbished for their guests. Like all the senior visitors, she had been allotted one of the giant old rooms of the Terem Palace. Once a waiting-chamber to the throne room, it had long since been converted to a bedroom suite by the installation of a huge private bathroom with antique brass plumbing.
She was currently in REM sleep, her sensorially deprived consciousness feeding on the keywords the DreamDial module of her VideoMate was whispering in her earpiece.
She had gone to bed feeling stressed and then decided she would treat herself. She loved the prompt sequence she had created that reliably produced one recurring dream: she would be at her childhood home with her mother, her sister and their horses, the ScentSim’s ‘Saddle and Bridle’ fragrance always prompting total recall. Then she would be at her high-school prom, dancing until she could dance no more. To follow that Connie had synchronized a fragrance of dark hormones to accompany words she had programmed to induce a dream about the prolonged, hard sex she craved but which, because of the strange life she led, she rarely found. She wished she could find a man to whom she could say such words, and with whom she could create these feelings, images and smells. But in her dreams she did – night after night, whenever she chose.
She was tossing and writhing with a smile on her face when an incoming high-priority override call jerked her awake. At night, all regular calls for Thomas Tye or for herself were routed to the front office on Hope Island where her eight assistants and forty administrative staff fielded the twenty-four-hour frenzy of communication that surrounded Thomas Tye. Only a few people had the facility to get through this barrier.
‘It’s Pat O’Mahoney in CTA,’ announced a voice redundantly after she had identified the caller and accepted the communication. She didn’t switch to visual. She couldn’t imagine what could be happening in the Competitive Threat Analysis department of the Tye Corporation that warranted her sleep being interrupted. That department of 260 people comprised surveillance staff monitoring the networks for the performance indicators of competitors, intercepting and deciphering encrypted messages that might be important, preparing briefings about possible acquisitions, and gathering information about other companies engaged in markets similar to the many fields of interest of the Tye Corporation.
‘Pat, yes,’ yawned Connie, as she swung her legs out of bed and tried to focus her thoughts. He was the keeper of Tye’s secret and was absolutely trusted. ‘What is it?’
‘Sorry to disturb you, Miss Law,’ apologized the CTA director. ‘But we thought you might want to alert Tom. Over the last couple of days something strange has been happening. There’s been a massive increase in the number of messages, communications and press stories about us – about the corporation. Plus a massive increase in articles about Tom himself and some of our subsidiaries. The networks are full of this stuff, mostly encrypted.’
‘How big an increase?’ asked Connie, curious.
‘It’s shot up to three or four times the usual,’ said O’Mahoney breathlessly. He’d spent several hours plucking up the courage to disturb Tom’s executive assistant. ‘We’ve never experienced anything like this before, and we can’t keep up. There are now large areas we’re not able to cover.’
‘OK, Pat,’ replied Connie. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll pass this by Tom.’
She ended the call, removed the earpiece and stood up. It was not yet five a.m., although Moscow’s summer dawn was already peeping through from behind the heavy drapes. She walked to the old-fashioned pedestal washbasin in the bathroom, ran some cold water and rinsed her face. Then she decided to risk one brief call. The increase in network traffic would be in her favour. She returned to the bed, picked up her VideoMate and told it to connect her to an office just outside Washington DC. As she waited for her call to be answered, she decided that she would not disturb Tom yet with this news. It would keep until morning.
Chapter Seventeen
‘Oh, I want to be sick,’ gasped Haley as she put the report down. ‘That little boy was grown in a box!’
It was a sunny Saturday morning in Battersea and, as before, the report had arrived by mail. She and Barr
y had just emerged, after an enthusiastic bout of early-morning lovemaking, to celebrate the start of the weekend. Even though most interpersonal communications had migrated to the global networks, the Royal Mail and its upstart competitors still found their daily workload increasing as more and more market researchers proclaimed that printed material remained the most powerful form of direct sales promotion. But apart from the junk mail that arrived each day, there were still enough people who liked to send picture postcards from their holidays, who wrote personal thank-you notes and who used printed anniversary, birthday and greetings cards for the postal delivery to remain a key event of people’s morning routines.
This report, the third to arrive unheralded and unsigned, had been posted in Berlin. Jack had informed Haley that whoever was posting these reports chose to do so only from main post offices in major city centres: standard anti-trace procedures. Haley had torn open the envelope immediately and settled down to read as Barry brewed the filter coffee.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Barry as he reached for the coffee mugs. Because of the heat they were both in T-shirts and shorts, although this sports combination looked better on Haley’s frame than on Barry’s. It didn’t help that his orange outfit clashed with his red hair and beard.
‘It claims that Tommy was grown in one of those boxes they use to keep donor organs alive – something called a MatchBox, with an artificial placenta.’
Barry laughed. ‘Well, that beats labour pains any day. Even better than a Caesarean.’
‘BARRY!’ exclaimed Haley. ‘I’m being serious. They made a cloned embryo, then grew it in this box. There’s even a diagram! That’s who Tye’s son is. That’s Tommy. Jack said he’s identical to his father.’
‘Who’s Jack, then?’ asked the Welsh geneticist lightly.
Haley looked up and frowned. She hadn’t previously mentioned her new contact – as he had asked.
‘Oh, he’s just someone inside the Tye Corporation,’ said Haley, equally lightly. ‘Helps me with research.’
Barry brought the mugs over to the table and sat down opposite as she returned to the report.
‘They harvested the baby after thirty-three weeks,’ she read aloud with a shudder.
‘Cool,’ deadpanned Barry as he sipped his coffee.
‘It is not cool, Barry Evans, it’s sick!’ shouted Haley as she slammed the pages down on the table. ‘You can’t grow someone in a box that you keep on the sideboard! How would that child hear his mother’s heartbeat – or external voices, or music? How would he feel movement? How would the baby bond with the mother, for God’s sake?’
‘Well, it beats putting up with morning sickness,’ smiled Barry. ‘I, for one, think the benefits of viviparous birth are greatly exaggerated. And it would be pretty safe – probably zero miscarriage rate, and you could pop in a bit of compost to help things along.’
‘You have no soul, Barry,’ complained Haley, getting seriously annoyed with his flippancy.
‘And you should bloody well lighten up, girl,’ protested Barry, also serious now, his sing-song accent increasing with his emotion. ‘It’s Saturday bloody morning but it’s always Thomas Tye this, the bloody Tye Corporation that. Now it’s this wonder child. It’s not your family. These people are trillionaires who can do anything they want – they live in the future! It’s not real life, girl. It’s not you and me, a few beers and a fish supper on a Friday night. But you don’t think about anything else but Thomas Tye and your bloody book. I would have thought a career girl like you would approve. You too could have a baby in a box and still concentrate on your bloody work.’
Haley drew a deep breath. She knew where it was going now; they both knew where it was going. It had been bubbling for weeks. They weren’t really made for each other and out of bed there was little they could share. Barry had seemed sensitive at first, but he really wanted a woman who was prepared to revolve around his life and his needs, not one who had a massive, all-consuming career agenda of her own. In recent weeks his behaviour had been expressing his dissatisfaction more eloquently than any words could. He had taken to spending his evenings in pubs or wine bars with his workmates. On Saturdays it was rugby or cricket and, if they saw each other on Sundays, he insisted that conversation about work should be taboo.
But Haley lived for her work. When she wasn’t actually writing she was composing words in her head. She was constantly recording little voice-notes on her VideoMate and scribbling on her DigiPad. Three or four times a night she would wake up and lean over to whisper quietly into the machine on her bedside table, trying not to disturb Barry if he was there. Even in her bath she would read background research, and over meals she would be flicking through her words already committed to paper. She realized this made her an impossible partner, but her real friends knew and understood – although of course they didn’t have to live with her. Furthermore, she was an intellectual and an artist; and Barry, despite his doctorate, was neither.
‘Time for us to have a little break from each other, I think, Doctor Evans,’ she said with a wan smile. ‘Just while I get this book finished. Anyway, I need to go abroad again.’
*
Al Lynch walked around his laboratory, using this period of waiting to exercise his back and leg muscles. He was out of his wheelchair for most of the working day now and he imagined he could feel the nerves regenerating at each end of his spinal cord. He was currently anticipating Ron Deakin’s imminent arrival from New York. The ban on network communication was placing a huge strain on both budgets and personnel.
The computer systems Lynch controlled in the UNISA lab at Fort Mead were the most powerful ever developed. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, the NSA had run Cray supercomputers to break codes, sift information and mine into mountains of generic data but, as silicon-based microprocessor circuits had shrunk to the point where their miniaturization had run up against the concrete wall of molecular physics, the NSA and, in turn, other intelligence agencies had pioneered the use of networked optical processors. These computers moved, measured and modified data inside beams of light and did so at a rate thousands of times faster than the supercomputers they had replaced.
Al Lynch had received his specially prepared storage card back in the regular post. Before their newly recruited UNISA intelligence officer had returned to Hope Island there had been much discussion about how Jack Hendriksen should transmit any data collected from Tye’s private systems back to the UN facility at Fort Mead. As his covering note explained, Jack had resolved this problem by simply asking one of his pilot pals in the Tye Corporation flight to post the padded envelope for him during a stopover in Washington: pilots stuck together, Al Lynch understood.
In hacker circles the program on the storage card Lynch had prepared for Jack would have been described as an ‘invisible tapeworm’. That nomenclature was outdated and referred to computer systems long since obsolete but hackers are a strangely nostalgic and conservative breed. Once inserted into a storage slot, the software could mimic the operating parameters of all known current and obsolete storage systems and, without leaving any trace of its presence, would copy every byte of data it could find in all local storage cards, flash memories and disks and on all storage systems, new and old, connected by common networks. It even collected files that had been ‘deleted’ but not yet overwritten. The holographic storage system was an IBM prototype: a single plastic card, three inches by two, could store forty-eight petabytes – forty-eight quadrillion bytes! – of data. Lynch found only 27.8112 petabytes on the card Jack had returned.
Only twenty-eight petabytes! A couple of decades ago that would have represented enough data to fill up the storage disks of over ten million of the most powerful desktop computers! The increasing fashion for videoing every meeting, and storing movies, music, reference books and TV shows on computers, as well as the latest fads of holo-image conferencing, taste-generation and scent simulations, were demanding storage and access technologies on a scale that wo
uld have been unthinkable even a few years earlier. And, of course, strong encryption created very large additional files. Fortunately, speed and storage were the types of problems that the computer industry had always been able to solve and, now that the cost of media storage had fallen to less than a penny a terabyte, everybody would hoard everything. A form of partial immortality was thus being achieved through virtual storage.
Almost all the major files in Tye’s private store of data had proved to be encrypted. ‘Suspicious bastard,’ Lynch had muttered as he watched screens full of random numbers and letters fly by. He presumed that years ago Tye had selected ‘Secure’ as the default setting for his communications and computer storage systems. Lynch had randomly dipped into these files in the hope that Tye might have become careless at some period and used a lower level of security, but all his analytical tools revealed encryption so dense that Lynch guessed that Tye must regularly apply the super-long string lengths normally used for military encryption. Lynch knew that even if he ran all his immense optical processing power against these twenty-eight petabytes of data, he wouldn’t have decoded a single message from it before he was due for retirement.
The night before, he had copied all the same data onto local flash storage and instructed his system to search only for the same two words in any scraps of unencoded text and images that might lie within the data mountain. Then he had put his jacket on, switched off the lights and walked slowly and carefully to his car. He only needed his wheelchair towards the end of each day now, when his muscles were screaming with tiredness. In another few weeks he hoped to be able to give it up completely, for the benefit of another needy user.
Lynch heard the door open and there stood his friend. The pair had worked together, on and off, for over twenty years and it had been Deakin himself who had first introduced the computer security analyst to Jack Hendriksen.
‘Jack told me you were out of your chair and walking,’ Ron Deakin exclaimed as he grasped Lynch’s hand. ‘That’s fantastic!’