Eternal Sonata

by Jamie Metzl

  As Tom Callahan speeds us to the airport, Sierra walks me through Adam Shelton’s incredible story. Born in Boston in 1970, graduated summa cum laude from MIT at eighteen, completed his PhD in data systems engineering three years later with offers to teach at Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech, ETH Zurich, and National University of Singapore, but instead moved to Israel and started a small data systems engineering company, IntelliData Systems. IDS has long been one of the key backbones of the global metadata network—in other words, the world—making Shelton one of the planet’s wealthiest people.

  And the most reclusive.

  With no family to speak of, he apparently spent the first quarter century of his career running the company from his top-floor apartments in the IDS co-headquarters in Tel Aviv and Singapore. Ten years ago, rumors emerged that he was afflicted with some kind of degenerative illness. As the IDS stock dipped, investors demanded that the mastermind behind the company’s unbridled global success make his personal information publically known. Instead, Shelton passed the CEO role to his former operations deputy, gave up his chairmanship, dropped off the board, and moved to Cuba, where he has scarcely been heard from since.

  Still the largest shareholder of IDS with a wealth estimated to top fifty billion dollars, Shelton allegedly used twenty billion to seed SBN and still had plenty to spare. No one knew exactly why he did it, but Sierra’s preliminary research unearthed a rumor that he was willing to spend whatever it took to cure the mysterious disease ailing him.

  Crossing the Broadway Bridge, I am not surprised to see the spotless A419 waiting on the tarmac. But I’m not ready to board. I ask Callahan to drive us to the general parking lot on the highway side of the municipal airport and wait.

  At 4 p.m. I am edgy; 4:15 nervous; 4:25 hardly able to breathe. At 4:27, Jerry’s Mahindra Neo comes sputtering toward us and screeches to a halt.

  Jerry jumps out the door and shuffles toward us with the data stick in his hand. I get out of the car to greet him.

  “Here it is,” he says breathlessly.

  I look down at the small, nondescript device. “Will it work?”

  “I hope so,” Jerry mumbles. “I didn’t have time to test it. I hardly had time to do it.” He takes my u.D off my wrist, then plugs it into the data stick. A small green light activates.

  “What do I do with this?”

  “I’m passing the file to your u.D. Just transfer it to Shelton’s u.D from yours. Tell him it’s for the SBN Council of Elders. Let him download it to their system. The rest is in the code.”

  I inhale deeply. Life, if I’ve learned anything so far, is in the code.

  “But if he suspects anything,” Jerry adds, “they’ll go through this bit by bit. I’ve camouflaged the virus as much as possible, but nothing is perfect. A general scan won’t pick it up. At least I don’t think it will. I can’t know for sure without testing.”

  His words hardly reassure me as I climb the stairs and board the plane. I’ve been on corporate jets a few times in my life but never one with gold-plated paneling and priceless art on the walls, or enhanced reality screens covering so much of the surface area; never one with its own gym and full bedroom; never one where I was the only passenger.

  The attendant, a formal, modelesque British blonde in her twenties, introduces herself as “Ms. Paige Newmark” and welcomes me to my seat. The seat feels more like a reclining sofa than any chair I’ve ever occupied in a plane. She offers me a hot towel and a drink. I politely refuse both as the plane taxis. In minutes we are off the ground. I close my eyes and think of Toni and Heller and Maurice, of Katherine Hart and Joel Glass.

  I tilt the chair back and try to sleep without any success. After twenty minutes or so, I sit up and rifle through the articles projected onto the plane’s digital wall. When Ms. Newmark brings dinner by, I try to enjoy the grilled scallops, cooked to perfection. Nothing makes the slightest dent in my nervousness.

  I assemble and reassemble in my jittery head all the data we’ve been collecting. The virus stored on my wrist feels like it’s entering my bloodstream. I am anxious to keep moving, but the flight seems to take forever.

  Every cell in my body is on edge as the Airbus finally begins its descent. Looking out the window, I see the distant glow in the night sky of what I assume to be the Havana waterfront. I’ve never been to Cuba, but since the death of the Castros, the end of the embargo, and the arrival of billions in casino investments from Macau, the sin city of the Havana Riviera is said to have come back with a vengeance. That’s certainly what the flashing lights look like from here. Inland, I see a few disparate points of light from what I assume to be lonely farmhouses and dilapidated shacks, the remnants of the island’s glorious revolution.

  But my plane doesn’t turn toward Havana. Instead it banks left toward a small airfield I see in lights out my window. My heart is pounding as the plane evens out and touches down.

  As our taxi nears its end a few minutes later, Ms. Newmark strides over. Even in heels on a moving plane, her walk maintains its placid grace. She speaks softly in her perfectly crisp British accent. “Welcome to Xanadu, Mr. Azadian.”

  35

  I breathe in the salty, humid, tropical air as the door opens. The light from the runway barely permeates the immense darkness of the surrounding trees. The sound of crashing waves merges with a symphony of chirps, tweets, and croaks oozing from the dense rainforest.

  Ms. Newmark leads me down the stairs and to the black Mercedes sedan parked nearby. “A la casa principal,” she instructs the driver in elegant Spanish as we get in.

  After about ten minutes of driving, the road through the thick forest begins to be punctuated by small lights. Brightening as we progress, the lights accent an incredible array of perfectly manicured bushes, exotic flowers, and sprawling banyan trees.

  As we turn right around a corner, the breathtaking floodlit mansion comes into view atop the hill. Dominating the space around it, the colossal yellow Spanish-style estate is divided into five sections with turrets rising from each side and a gargantuan wooden veranda floating over a large central entryway. Light refracts off the crests of waves breaking in the distance.

  “It has quite a history,” Ms. Newmark says, responding to my widened eyes. “Dr. Shelton may choose to tell you about it.”

  Something about the reverent way she references Shelton unsettles me.

  The car rolls to a careful stop in front of the house. Ms. Newmark walks around the car and opens my door, pointing me toward the main entrance. As I approach, the massive wooden doors open electronically.

  Lined with polished mahogany, the wooden buttresses lattice the entryway’s vaulted ceiling. The floors are a complex mosaic of blue, green, and white marble.

  I wander into the first room through a narrow pathway lined with quartz and enter the immense atrium.

  Four ultra-modern, white L-shaped sofas complete a large square around the near perimeter of the room. The center area is dominated by an elaborate chandelier hanging down from what must be a fifty-foot ceiling. A tall cylindrical table stands in the middle of the room with a single glass of white wine on it, which I presume is for me. Large Chinese-looking murals of warriors on horseback line the walls to my right and left and facing the water. I stand staring at one, trying to figure out what story it’s trying to tell.

  “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree.”

  The words are recited so calmly they don’t startle me, even though I hadn’t heard anyone come in. Perhaps he was here all along. I turn to see Adam Shelton standing motionless behind me.

  “Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” I say without thinking, momentarily annoyed by Shelton’s canned introduction.

  He gives me an appreciative nod. Short and compact, his brown hair is shaved to half an inch. His blue suit fits tightly over his gray shirt and articulated muscles. His sharp metallic-blue eyes focus over sunken cheeks. He scrutinizes me intensely for a moment more than feels comfortable. “I trust your ride here
was satisfactory?”

  “Do I need to answer that question?”

  “Money can buy many things, but it can’t buy everything.”

  “Was it John or Paul who wrote that?” I say. “I never can remember.”

  Shelton keeps his eyes tracked intensely, and uncomfortably, on me. Augmented Retinal Display lenses may be the latest gadget among the digerati, but I still can’t get used to their robotic transformation of the human eye. I wonder what sort of data Shelton is currently being fed as I search for a hint of humor on his face or evidence of his rumored ill-health but see neither. “Thank you for agreeing to meet me on such short notice.”

  “We both know the stakes are high. There was no other choice.”

  I stare back at him, waiting for him to reveal something, anything.

  “We have important business tonight. Let me show you around the house and give you time to refresh before dinner,” he continues. “We can talk then about why you are here.”

  Shelton leads me out a side door to the veranda at the back of the house. I hear waves crashing into the cement breaker below.

  “Nature’s majesty,” he says.

  I let the comment settle. Few things highlight our smallness more than the vast ocean. “But left to nature we’d all live disease-ridden lives to die at forty.”

  “I read your book,” he says, shifting his approach. “You have a lot to be proud of.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Four billion years of mother nature and now our evolution is up to us. It’s an enormous responsibility.”

  “In part,” I say, “increasingly. So why are you here? Why retreat to this isolated place?”

  He looks out across the ocean void. “Is this not enough?”

  I wonder what more he is seeing through his ARD lens. “I guess that depends on the scope of a person’s ambitions.”

  “I can assure you, Mr. Azadian, I am quite content in that category.” He scrutinizes me as if taking my measure. “The house was built—”

  “House?”

  “Was built by Irenee DuPont, just before he retired as chairman of one of the biggest chemical companies in the world. He chose this spot on the San Bernadino crags, imported the best of everything to build his Xanadu.”

  “His choice of name?”

  “Of course. For my generation it’s a trashy Olivia Newton-John song and an ill-fated mall in New Jersey.”

  I smile nervously.

  “But it’s still an interesting choice. Xanadu was Kublai Khan’s summer palace. The Mongols had ruthlessly conquered China and needed a place that felt more like home than Beijing.”

  “So this is where you come after the whoop-ass?”

  “DuPont was a powerful man and also a fascist sympathizer who supported Hitler in the early years.” Shelton pauses reflexively. “Ironic.”

  I assume he means it’s ironic that DuPont’s palace is now owned by a Jew, but I can’t be sure.

  “He wanted to inject young men with special chemicals to turn them into eugenic supermen,” Shelton adds.

  I pivot to stare straight into Shelton’s eyes. “And the world comes full circle?”

  36

  The strangeness has been growing from the moment the plane touched down, but it multiplies as Shelton leads me around the immense mansion.

  The building is a hundred years old, but it hardly feels it. Shelton describes the painstaking refurbishment process he began eight years ago after buying the old Varadero Golf Club. He restored the mansion to its original splendor and repurposed the golf course. Part of the grounds became his private airport, part lavish gardens, and the rest was transformed into a rainforest and indigenous wildlife preserve.

  Every detail of the building is perfect, every fixture a reflection of its original in form but fully modernized in function. The crystal candelabras lining the walls gradually brighten as we enter each room and dim as we exit. The thick mahogany doors slide gently apart as we approach and slip back together after we’ve walked through. Although I see the faint shadows of black-clad guards outside, I see no people, no staff, no attendants other than a few Robotic Home Assistants docked at their stations, but I know that invisible workers must be making the mansion spotless. It’s hard to imagine Shelton scouring the place with a bucket.

  The isolation, storied past, and mysterious present of the estate and the enigma of Shelton are mesmerizing, but as he leads me through the vast grounds I keep reminding myself why I’m here. Heller is dead, two policemen are dead, Hart and Wolfson are missing, Toni is in danger, and the narrative of human mortality is on the verge of revolution. Focus.

  “Shall we call you for dinner in an hour?” Shelton says as we approach a closed door apparently not yet instructed to open.

  His question is not meant to be answered.

  “You’ll find everything you need,” he adds, tapping his wrist to open the ornate door. He walks away as I enter.

  The corner room is larger than an entire floor of my house, the ceilings at least twenty-five feet high. Massive windows on two sides overlook the vast darkness of the ocean. Shards of light bounce off the crests of breaking waves. The marble floors are immaculately polished, the enormous bathroom filled with every conceivable item a person might want; the bathtub is larger than a whirlpool and filled with fresh flower petals.

  Some other time it would be easy to be intoxicated by the scene. I imagine Toni and me taking a vacation in a place like this someday. But this is not that time. I find myself gently rubbing the u.D on my right wrist. Learn what you can, pass the file, go home.

  I prepare a bath and settle in to think.

  In the calm of the hot water, images of the past five days flash restlessly through my brain as I struggle to put the pieces together. Vast synaptic gaps still separate the data points.

  I get out of the water and put on the lush bathrobe and slippers. As I shave and comb my hair, the mirror tracks and expands the reflection of my hand movements, making me feel strangely like Cinderella getting ready for the ball. The collared shirt and sports coat in my closet are, disturbingly, exactly my size.

  At precisely an hour from when Shelton left me, I hear three sharp knocks on my door and open it.

  “Good evening, sir,” Ms. Newmark says formally. “Will you come with me?”

  She walks me up a flight of stairs to a vast open deck surrounded by Alhambric columns. The room is empty but for a long, thin rectangular table in the middle. The sound of rolling waves crashes through the room. Two place settings are set across from each other. Shelton is standing at the far wall gazing out over the ocean darkness. Ms. Newmark guides me to him.

  “I can stand here for hours,” Shelton murmurs, without turning toward me.

  I sense he means what he’s saying, but the artificiality of our interaction again grates on me. He may be someone who strategically maps out every word before he speaks but I don’t have the patience for theatrics right now.

  “This place is magnificent,” I say, “no doubt. But, if you’ll forgive me, I’m here because people are dead and people I care about deeply are in danger. Scientists Beyond Nations is part of the story, and you are the story behind SBN.”

  He turns and looks at me sharply. His stare is unsettling, even through the ARD lenses. “I know that, Mr. Azadian,” he says. “Please tell me what you know.”

  “There’s a lot I also need to learn from you.”

  “As I believe you already know, I’m not one who readily parts with personal information.”

  “Then this may be a short dinner.”

  His eyes remain locked on mine. “We can talk.”

  Shelton presses a button on a small device resting on the table. The glass doors slide gently shut as a roof rolls out slab by slab, turning the exterior space interior. The sound of the crashing waves vanishes.

  I hear the faint din of classical music that sounds like Bach. Again, Bach.

  “May I ask what inspired you to establish SBN?” I say af
ter an awkward pause.

  “It wasn’t only me. I was what they call ‘present at the creation.’ A lot of incredibly important science was being suppressed by governments. Look at what’s happening in the United States. Alvarez and King are clawing each other’s eyes out over health care, and you can’t even have a decent debate. It’s no better in other countries. The Chinese are hijacking science for the state; the Russian kleptocrats are feeding the illicit market in human organs. It’s not pretty. A lot of great scientists were peering over the horizon into the future and didn’t have faith their work could be protected from government interference or attacks by fundamentalists of every stripe. A lot of people feared that science fueled by profit or ideology or national security interests instead of a careful consideration of the future of our species and our planet could wind up taking disastrous turns. The fears already existed, the scientists already existed. I helped give them a framework, a ship, and the funds to secure their future.”

  “Not a small contribution,” I say, “or a small ship.”

  “As you can see, I am not a man of small things.”

  “Some would say government regulation serves a purpose, that unregulated science can lead to grotesque outcomes.”

  “And they would be right. We know all too well what the Nazi doctors did, the unmoored competition to alter the human genome you described in your book. Science detached from morality is the world’s greatest danger; in service of it, it is our greatest hope.”

  “But who decides what is moral? You?”

  “It’s fair for you to ask,” Shelton replies. “That’s why we created the SBN Council of Elders. No single person, no single nation, is capable of making that decision. The United Nations is useless. Perhaps the best we can do is empower a select group of wise people to help guide us. It’s not a perfect answer, but it doesn’t need to be perfect. It only needs to be better than the alternatives. The science is not going away. As a matter of fact, it’s progressing at an exponential pace difficult for most people to fathom.”

  “Can you tell me more about your connection to the Council?”