by J D Lasica
He smiled that slanted smile of his and slid his seat back. “I wanted to bottle that day.”
He sounded like he might not see her again.
16
Minsk, Belarus, and Samana Cay
Maxim Volkov sat at the control console in his high-tech home office in Belarus where he oversaw his financial empire. He wanted to make sure Phase One was ready to go, and time was short. His flight to the Summit was leaving in five hours.
He barked out a voice message: “Bashir, we need to talk. SCIF now.”
In seconds, the response came back: “Heading to Blackout.”
Volkov watched his chief scientist scurry past microbiologists hovering over test tube racks and microscopes, past computer screens where neurophysiologists were studying microelectrode recordings of the brain.
Bashir entered the Blackout Room, set up as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility in a remote corner of the Lab. The glass windows were darkened and soundproofed so none of Bashir’s lab coats could even imagine what was taking place inside.
Bashir secured the door behind him. “Chairman, this is a surprise.”
“I need to know if everything is on track. After a year of research, we’re entering our operational phase.”
“Yes, Chairman.”
His voice was transmitting fine, but he still needed a body for this virtual meeting. Volkov never appeared as himself in these video chats. He appeared as an immersive display projected by the other participant’s smartglasses. His fingers lingered over the array of buttons on the console in front of him.
Let’s see. Which avatar shall I choose today? Ezekiel, of course! How could it be anything else?
He had spent weeks perfecting the dress and appearance of his favorite digital alter ego. The simple olive-colored cloth shawl. Ezekiel’s blue eyes (like his own) and mop of scraggly white hair (unlike his own wild mane of brown hair). The prominent nose (true enough). The long white beard and mustache (longer than his woodsman’s beard).
As he spoke, so did his Ezekiel avatar—a hologram-like figure grasping a wooden staff and seated at the table across from Bashir.
“The neurobiology progress reports you’ve been sending over have been somewhat dense. Give me a status report.”
“Well, where to begin?”
“Let’s rewind one year ago this week to your sub expedition.”
“All right. We managed—”
“Twelve months when the deadline called for six months.”
Bashir’s eyes darted from the Ezekiel avatar to one of the webcams on the far wall. “I made it clear from the start the timeline was too aggressive. We’ve accomplished a great deal in a very short time. I’ve worked my team around the clock—”
“Yes, the clock. Your disregard for our timeline has pushed back the entire operation.”
“The science cannot be rushed. You’re asking for something science has never done before.”
“Which is why I hired you in the first place.”
After an exhaustive global search, he had personally recruited Bashir, the most renowned microbiologist in all of Saudi Arabia. He had both the right pedigree and mindset to head up the science behind Project Ezekiel. He’d agreed to head up the R&D division of Samana Ventures two years ago. He’d built this lab and put together an all-star team of like-minded researchers. Just as important, he shared Volkov’s devotion to the radically reimagined world that would soon emerge.
“Let’s review your disregard of deadlines to assess whether the project has been compromised. The Greenland expedition was a success, was it not?”
Bashir retrieved a laptop from a smaller table behind him. “Absolutely. As we discussed at the time, this was a high-risk, high-reward gambit. The challenge was to find a vector that could be easily transmitted to tens of millions of targeted subjects.”
“Go on. I’m recording this for posterity.”
“I presented several options. We selected the one where the biological agent would be masked. All but undetectable.”
“And the name of this biological agent?”
“Genetically modified archaea. You can’t find a single-celled organism hardier than the specimens we collected at the entrance to hydrothermal vents along the North Pole’s Gakkel Ridge. These organisms have no parallels among animals, plants, bacteria, viruses. They’re not even distant cousins. Traditional laws of biology do not apply.”
“That was the whole point, was it not?” So far, Volkov knew all of this, but he enjoyed hearing the summary of Bashir’s scientific breakthrough.
Bashir pulled up his keyboard and stabbed out commands. “We literally cannot find any organisms older than archaea on the planet—and to think they were unknown to science just fifty years ago! If you compare their DNA to a bacterium or virus, they lack certain bits that are always there. And they contain other bits that shouldn’t be there.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Chairman, I’m making the point that we started from scratch. We had no scientific research to build on top of. No case studies to reference.”
“Continue,” Volkov said.
“It took my team twelve months to get us here, with not a day wasted. The breakthrough came three weeks ago when our Lab synthesized the final base pair blueprint into a new genetically modified organism.”
“In layman’s terms, please.”
“The two strains we’re developing need to be modified to induce the desired effects in our targets. But first, they need to reach the targets. They need to survive the gauntlet posed by modern drinking water systems.”
Volkov knew this posed a challenge. In New York City, for instance, residents might be surprised to learn that one-quarter of all the water flowing into the city's water pipes comes from the massive Pepacton Reservoir a hundred miles away. The water travels through mountains and deep valleys through aging aqueducts, flows underground in tunnels, and settles into vast holding tanks, where it gets treated with chlorine to kill bacteria and fluoride to prevent tooth decay. It then undergoes a final dose of ultraviolet light to kill any nasties that may have slipped through.
Volkov said, “So you’re saying your lab coats have found a way for the strains to survive this purification process.”
“Yes, Chairman. We’ve designed the perfect carrier.”
Bashir punched a few keys and turned the laptop screen toward the webcam. The screen showed a magnified image of a writhing organism. Ugly little bugger. Looked like a tube-shaped purple sponge.
“Behold, a life form that never before existed in nature.”
Bashir looked a bit too self-satisfied, as if he expected a Nobel Prize for his work. But there would be no awards or ceremonies. Only a shift in the world’s balance of power.
Volkov led him through the final steps of Project Ezekiel to date. “The archaea you describe are the carriers—the transmission agents—that our operatives have begun delivering to major drinking water systems in the U.S. and Europe, correct?”
“Yes, Chairman. The Plant has begun producing large supplies of the treated water.”
“And you’re confident the biological agents will avoid detection, at least until they propagate?”
“I am. We know viral biological agents are difficult to detect. Viruses are tasteless and odorless. By way of comparison, pathogenic archaea are a thousand times more difficult to detect. Archaea reside in the nose, lungs, gut, and on the skin of every person on the planet. Put the archaea under a microscope and you won’t see the variations we introduced--you'd need to examine them at the molecular level to detect the pathogenic genes.”
“Looks can be deceiving.”
“Precisely. Every other type of microorganism produces potential toxins: bacteria, viruses, fungi. They can all make host organisms ill. But there are no known examples of archaea with pathogenic properties.”
“Until now.”
“Indeed, Chairman. Pathogenic archaea are not on anyone’s radar. And until they’r
e activated, they’re harmless.”
“A final matter. Lucid tells me mass production of the vaccine and the cure is now underway at the Plant.”
“Correct.”
“That’s good.” The vaccine and the cure will be immeasurably valuable—but they aren’t for sale. “Make sure all staff on the island receive the vaccine.”
“We’ve already begun the inoculations.”
“Bashir, thank you for that summary. We trust each other’s word, do we not?”
“Yes, Chairman.”
“Can you give me your word that every one of your men—and they are all men, as we discussed, correct?”
“Correct, sir.”
“Can you assure me that all your lab workers can be trusted to execute Project Ezekiel?”
“All team members are put through a rigorous screening process, including psychological testing. So yes, sir, I’m confident. They’re true believers in our cause.”
“Good. In a few days’ time, the first strain will propagate throughout the drinking water supplies, waiting for us to activate it. You now have a new deadline. One week from today we we trigger the strain—we launch Phase One of the project.”
Bashir pushed back from the table in his office chair. “Chairman, we’re only now completing the clinical trials—”
“Think of it this way. The targets on the ground will become part of the trials.”
Bashir’s objections were predictable. It was one thing to propagate the first strain through public drinking supplies. It was quite another to activate the strain and have it produce the desired effects. Yet the timeline required urgency. Destiny demanded it.
“Sir, if I may, that’s a very aggressive timetable.”
Volkov’s avatar, Ezekiel, stamped his staff onto the ground. Haptics filled in the sound effects and rattled the floor, making Bashir recoil.
“One week, Bashir. The countdown begins at this moment.”
17
Zug, Switzerland
Kaden stepped off the train from Zurich just behind her new team members. She’d never heard of Zug, a once-sleepy burg in the Alps. But she read about it on the way over. Seems just about everyone in the crypto space knows about the place. If the San Francisco Bay Area was the epicenter of the tech revolution, Zug was the capital of the crypto economy.
Which is why a thousand business leaders from around the world were expected to descend on Switzerland’s Zug Valley this weekend for the first Crypto/Blockchain Grand Summit, a gathering of the crypto elite.
If Bo’s intelligence sources were right, the goal of this gathering was to lay the foundation to displace the U.S. dollar and euro as the cornerstone of global finance. Which didn’t interest Kaden in the slightest.
She was here to find Bailey. And get revenge for Gabriel. Not necessarily in that order.
The conference was taking place in a four-star hotel and adjoining buildings at the far end of the old town of Zug. To get a feel for the setting, the whole crew took a walk: Kaden, Bo, Nico, Carlos, Tosh, and Judy Matthews. The old town seemed transported from an earlier century, nestled beside a pretty lake and rimmed by Alpine mountains and hills dusted with snow.
Night was already falling, so they gathered in an old-timey cafe facing the lakefront. The others left their overnight bags in the foyer, but Tosh and Carlos insisted on taking their large black handbags inside. A crush of business types jammed the cafe. Looked like a lot of the conference attendees had already arrived.
Kaden searched the eyes of this makeshift team of intelligence gatherers. She had always fantasized about being part of an intelligence task force. She didn’t picture this. “What’s the plan?”
“Damn, girl, we haven’t even ordered yet,” Carlos said.
“I’m not thinking about food,” she said.
“All right,” Bo stepped in. “Here’s how I see this going. We get the lay of the land tonight but call it an early night. Carlos has whipped up six day passes for us tomorrow, and we’ll be on the lookout for any known black market targets in our database. Tomorrow night’s the grand ball you and I will be attending.”
Kaden decided to play devil’s advocate. “But this all sounds random. Maybe we’ll spot some shady characters, maybe we’ll be able to follow the food chain up to the higher ups.”
“We’re not doing random,” Judy Matthews broke in. She turned to Bo. “Tell her. Tell her why I’m here. Why Tosh is here.”
Good question. Kaden was wondering the same. The waitress came and took their orders while Kaden waited for Bo to respond.
“We got our introductions out of the way at the club,” he said. “We don’t have time for a practice run, we’re creating this operation on the fly. Kaden, Carlos, and I have new aliases that we’ll use during the conference. Nico will head up operational support. Tosh is our gadgets guy. And Judy is our translation specialist during our monitoring operation.”
“Monitoring what?” Nico asked.
Carlos and Tosh glanced at each other, reached under the table, and set their black valises on their laps.
Tosh leaned forward and lowered his voice, which was already hard to hear above the sounds of the Bavarian folk songs coming from speakers overhead.
“We’ve brought our mobile command unit with us. Tonight and tomorrow we cover every inch of old town with listening devices.”
“Switzerland is one of the top five countries in the world in terms of Internet speeds,” Nico chimed in. “That should help.”
“Yeah, but how do you get that kind of coverage?” Kaden was dubious. “There’s like a thousand attendees here.”
Tosh looked at Bo to see how much he could say. Bo gave a quick nod.
“Micro-drones,” Tosh said. “The short answer is we’ll be filling every street lamp, every tree limb, every restaurant rafter and conference room with cheap, dumb, but ubiquitous and effective micro-drones.”
He reached into his valise and placed a small white box on the table. He opened it, took out a small object, and placed it on his fingertip. Tosh was turning out to be a real gearhead.
“Look at that!” Judy leaned closer and marveled.
Kaden had to squint to see the tiny propellers. She found the idea audacious. Could it possibly work? “This is an international gathering with lots of different languages spoken.”
Judy said, “I’m fluent in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish. Can get by in Chinese, Russian, and Ukrainian. The official language of the conference is English but yeah, we expect the streets and hallways will be a potpourri of languages.”
“But you can’t possibly listen to every conversation,” Kaden said.
“We can’t,” Tosh agreed. “Normally we’d be transmitting live streams of all audio to an offsite facility that can monitor for keywords in real time. It’s a huge data mining job, and we don’t have the set-up for that on such short notice.”
“So what we do we do?”
Tosh looked at her dead on. “We use a local AI. We use Amelia.”
“Well, good to know!” Kaden said. As she thought about it, it struck her. Of course! This would be a perfect use case for an artificial intelligence. “I’ll have to add a few language libraries to her dataset.”
Bo gave his slanted smile. “Looks like your imaginary friend may come in handy after all.”
Carlos looked around to make sure no one was looking. He took out his phone and launched the micro-drone from Tosh’s fingertip.
“Let’s get this party started,” Tosh said.
18
Minsk, Belarus, and Samana Cay
Maxim Volkov watched as Lucid approached the Data Center on Samana Cay and took out his mobile device to monitor his biometrics. One last meeting before they both needed to jet off to the Summit.
The screen in front of Volkov lit up with Lucid’s vitals. Body temp, blood pressure, blood oxygen, air quality, temperature, humidity, radiation levels—all readings were normal. The chip implants and subdural sensors emb
edded in his arms, hands, upper torso, and legs were operating at optimal levels.
A few months after Lucid had gotten chipped, Wired magazine ran a profile piece describing him as “the world’s most connected human.” That’s how Lucid came to Volkov’s attention. In their first conversation, Lucid complained about the magazine dubbing him a “half-cyborg”; he preferred the term “posthuman.” After all, he argued, he was the epitome of an advanced augmented human, pioneering the path toward the Singularity, the merging of man and machine.
The Data Center’s main doors whooshed open as Lucid approached. But what’s this? He’s being accompanied by one of the guests.
“Lucid, who’s with you? Do they have clearance?” His voice took on an urgent tone. Lucid was wearing his earpiece for their scheduled check-in.
“Excuse me.” Lucid stepped away from the guest. “I need a moment.”
“I’ll wait,” the guest said at the guard desk.
Volkov watched as Lucid advanced down the marble hallway to the Multimedia Room. As he entered, a phalanx of monitors blinked to life, forty in all across the main wall and two side walls.
“Do we need to meet?” Lucid asked.
“No, I’ll make this quick. I’m flying to the Summit in an hour. You?”
“Two hours.” Lucid gave no sign he was upset at being consigned to a separate flight.
“We need to discuss logistics when you arrive.” This gathering of the Compact has to run like a Swiss watch.
“Yes, Chairman.”
“Who’s the visitor?”
“Evelyn Gladstone. She paid a six-figure premium for the right to observe the simulations and have me give a quick tour.”
“Observe? As in, voyeurism?”
“That’s a label, sir. We’re careful to avoid labels.”