The Infinet

by John Akers

  “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 was 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 fa
stest-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 Swiss 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.

  “Unfortunately, the market trial results were even worse than my worst-case imaginings. In the United States, several people died from side effects caused by the drug, and the FDA forced the company to pull the drug from the marketplace. Of course, the executive team covered themselves by firing me and blaming me for everything. This was in the days before the Univiz, and all my conversations with them had been face-to-face and unrecorded, so it was my word against theirs. With no proof I’d been bullied into doing what they wanted, I wound up disgraced and shunned by the other scientists in the company. On top of it all, the government began an investigation, and it seemed probable I would wind up going to jail.”

  “What did you do?” asked Pax.

  “I was devastated, as you can imagine. I panicked and fled the country before any charges were filed, and used the money I’d saved to travel to remote corners of the world and lose myself in alcohol and drugs. Back then if one had cash and was willing to take extreme measures to live in the shadows, it was still possible to stay off the grid.”

  Alethia fell silent, looking pensive and remorseful. Pax felt better hearing her story, although he reminded himself she might be making it all up in hopes of playing on his heartstrings. Eventually, she continued.

  “After hiding out for a year, I grew disgusted with myself and resolved to atone for my sins. I decided I would return to America to face any criminal charges, but first I needed to do something to redeem myself, at least in my own eyes. I promised myself I would find a meaningful cause I could help advance. Eventually, whether through luck or fate, I discovered this society. I was immediately drawn to its mission, and I vowed to do everything in my power to help it succeed. Then I would return and face judgment for my earlier actions, and suffer whatever penalties there might be.”

  “So do you still keep in touch with anyone from your earlier life?” asked Pax.

  “I communicate with my mother occasionally, mostly just to let her know I’m okay. I haven’t spoken or written to my father since I left.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “For a long time, it was out of shame for my actions. Then, one day not too long after the Infinet originally came online, I was testing the quality of its search capabilities, as well as its ability to answer abstract questions based on the results. On a whim, I asked it whether my father was a good man or not. In a nanosecond, it pulled up reams and reams of incriminating information about numerous affairs he’d had, stretching back to just a few months after he’d married my mother. It was worse than a CIA dossier. Most of it came from publicly accessible video logs and location sensors which it correlated with those of the women he was seeing.”

  “I learned later on that my mother knew all along about the affairs. She came from a family who believed divorce was sacrilegious, however, so she tried to turn a blind eye to it. But eventually, she sought solace in the arms of another. When she admitted it to my father soon after, it was he who immediately filed for divorce. The woman he later married was someone he had been seeing for several months before he and my mother separated. But he somehow managed to hide the fact he was dating her from me until a month later.”

  “That must have been quite a shock.”

  “It turned my world upside down. For someone as intelligent as I supposedly was to make such an erroneous, long-term misjudgment about a person I’d known all my life underscored how fundamentally fallible humans can be, how our biases and misperceptions can inherently confound anything we think or do.”

  “So was the Infinet your idea?” Pax asked.

  “No, although I fully supported it from the start. But the original idea came from someone else.”

  “Who?”

  Alethia sighed. “A man who is no longer with us. His name was Alton Isaacs, but within the Society, he was known as Gaon.”

  “That’s a weird name.”

  “It’s the Hebrew word for genius,” said Alethia.

  “Wow. I hope he didn’t pick that name himself.”

  Alethia gave a half-hearted chuckle. “No, he hated the name. Someone else started addressing him that way as a sign of respect. The word also carries the connotation of being a leader and a teacher, and those qualities definitely applied to him. Alton was the most selfless person I’ve ever meet. His focus was always on other people, never on himself. Although he was aware of people’s shortcomings, he always believed in humanity’s potential.”

  “I’ve noticed you keep referring to him in the past tense. What happened to him? Did he die?”

  “Me
taphorically, perhaps, but not literally. At least not that we’re aware. Shortly before the first version of the Infinet came online, Alton came in one day and started talking about how it was all a mistake, the project wouldn’t work, and we should terminate it immediately.

  “We were all stunned, of course, and tried to get him to explain why he suddenly felt that way. But he couldn’t or wouldn’t articulate a good reason. It seemed to be an intuition rather than any tangible evidence he could provide.

  Needless to say, the team refused to discontinue the project, although it was uncomfortable to do so, given Alton’s status in the group. So he left. Didn’t bother to say goodbye to anyone or tell anyone where he was going, just turned and walked out. No one has seen or heard from him since.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes. Even the Infinet can’t find him, and it can normally locate anyone within a matter of minutes, no matter where they are. But not Gaon.” She smiled wistfully, almost proudly, it seemed to Pax.

  Alethia suddenly looked off to one side again. After a moment she said, “Well, now you know more about me, and a little bit more about our Society.” Pax started to ask another question but she cut him off. “I can answer more questions later, but I’d strongly suggest we continue with what we need to show you. At least for now.”

  Pax wondered if she’d gotten a communication from the Infinet or someone else when she’d glanced away. Given what he’d seen, it didn’t seem far-fetched these people might have comms tech embedded in their bodies. But he’d detected a trace of genuine anxiety in her voice when she’d spoken, so he decided to agree. “Go ahead,” he said.

  Alethia quickly continued from where she had left off, as though she thought Pax might change his mind. Images of large clusters of buildings near a large river on the wall formed into a three-dimensional image and moved over in front of where Alethia and Pax sat.