New Praetorians 2 - Shetani Zeru Bryan

by R. K. Syrus

  Licht’s office is framed by nearly a hectare of flawless tempered projection glass. Manipulating its real-time magnification like a touchscreen, he can see right to his border with France. Rectangular viewlets cascade. Focal-point recognition software tries to center each one on a feature it thinks he might want to look at more closely.

  A red-throated loon circles the still surface of a lake.

  Over a fork in the road looms a dark statue of the Hindu deity Shiva. It’s been here since the CERN facility went bankrupt and was sold by the government to Lichtwerks.

  A line of armored limousines and exotic sports cars stretches down Seven Rays Avenue toward the reception rotunda.

  Tonight’s guests. Most are eager to brownnose. Many secretly hope to gawk with jealous schadenfreude. Licht sees no sign of the man. He has hated the Scotsman for so long his animosity seems like deep friendship.

  Maybe that grandstander Ranulph Oliphant will arrive in a Formula 0 car borrowed from the Highlands racing team he is so proud of.

  The crowd of dignitaries and celebrities, Oliphant, and that inconvenient Ansible particle, will have wait. Dr. Licht has an executive placement interview, one that cannot be put off.

  A console panel glows under his finger.

  “Send in the journalist.”

  “Yes, Herr Doktor.”

  “Let me know about Oliphant. Not just when he is here. The instant he crosses from France.”

  “Yes, Herr Doktor.”

  The room is cathedral sized. Licht made certain it was one meter larger in all dimensions than St. Peter’s. Harboring a secret, smoldering resentment of the Pope, he’d modeled many aspects of Der Lichtstrom on the Vatican.

  Instead of a chandelier, a water tank hangs from the ceiling. It is shaped like a three-dimensional ocean wave. Empty. The baby dolphin that was supposed to be inside playing happily decided to drop dead. Ingratitude seems to cross species boundaries.

  “Make sure the kitchen purées all of the dolphin for the canapés.”

  “Yes, Herr Doktor.”

  As he turns off the intercom, his hands feel an ugly knot in the wood of the desk. An imperfection. It’s not the wood, of course. It is him.

  Licht’s hands have not operated a tool press for fifty years. Every time he clenches his left, a lump of scar tissue reminds him of time spent in his father’s machine shop. That apprenticeship left its mark. Embedded in the palm is a twisted imprint of a precision screw.

  Decades ago, some Blödian janitor working in his family’s factory spilled sulfuric acid. It ate into machinery and a freshly threaded screw sprang out of the high-pressure forge, right into the heel bones of his hand. The doctors had to insert smaller screws just to keep it attached.

  One tiny man’s negligence had nearly turned him into a feeble cripple. The image of the hexagonal bolt, its looping threads, are there still. As though at the instant of impact, he had been made of wax.

  The Lichtstrom sits between France and Switzerland. After his discovery of orderly neutrinos and their use as communication wavelengths, Lichtwerks’ business grew exponentially. Luckily, funding cuts to scientific programs had left the world’s largest supercollider array in mothballs.

  The Large Hadron Collider at CERN was the most exclusive whisper listing in the history of real estate. His bid was uncontested. No one likes real estate that is haunted.

  Governments and universities were put off by videos of human sacrifices to Shiva being carried out in the supercollider levels. It seemed a few of the scientists searching for the God Particle were also indulging in a little blood-magic spiritualism on the side.

  After he bought the place, Licht kept the cultists’ icon. A five-meter-tall statue of the Destroyer of Worlds stands at the driveway to Seven Rays Avenue.

  The journalist is shown in. Doors close behind him without a sound. He is swarthy, slightly nervous, slightly proud. A youngish man in a wrinkled suit. Not the noblest sacrifice, but he’ll do.

  20

  Licht watches the reporter walk past holographic corporate poster. The wiry nervous Indonesian man pretends to study them.

  In the first, a pair of hands release a crystal dove ready to fly into a faultless blue sky.

  FINALLY, FREEDOM IS FREE!

  CALLS & DATA:

  FREE, UNLIMITED & INSTANT, EVERYWHERE.

  STEP INTO THE LIGHT

  Back then, he only had a jury-rigged neutrino array in the Balkans. At the time that damn Scotsman held the patent on the only handsets that would work with his system.

  In the next framed poster, a small cold sun glowers down through thin atmosphere onto a broken old-style cell phone. An astronaut’s boots have stepped on it in frustration. The phone’s bits are crushed and lie on powdery red soil.

  NO BARS? MIGHT AS WELL BE ON MARS!

  Below this are a trio of happy Licht/Net users. One stands on top of Everest. The next sits five miles below sea level in the Mariana Trench. The last is a content-looking exploration robot transmitting from one of Saturn’s moons.

  WHEREVER YOU GO, WE ARE ALREADY THERE.

  The last holo poster displays his flagship product: cybernetic implant phones. A young woman’s hand holds a child’s. Their skin glows with embedded circuitry.

  YOU ARE THE PHONE!

  NEVER LOSE TOUCH WITH THE ONES YOU LOVE!

  LEARN MORE AT SIMCARDIMPLANTS/LICHT

  “Herr Doktor Licht, thank you for seeing me. Especially today, of all days.”

  “For one of Indonesia’s leading reporters I would do nothing less.” He motions to a chair. “Mr. Shara.”

  “Call me Tommy, everyone does.”

  Licht still feels drawn to the windows. Oliphant. The Ansible test. The scenario taking shape hundreds of meters below their feet pulls his thoughts like an electromagnet tugging on a skull full of iron filings.

  “Doctor?”

  Shara’s voice brings his attention back.

  “Oh, nothing.” Oliphant. The Ansible test. “I’m just hoping my guests are being taken care of.”

  “I saw them arriving and enjoyed one of the canapés.” He wipes the corners of his mouth with a monogrammed napkin. “You really outdid yourself. Today has been billed as the most important science event since the Trinity nuclear test.”

  “I might not go so far,” Licht says. “This space elevator above you may have more realistic worth. In its first year of operation, it will deliver more tonnage to orbit than all the rocket ships since the start of space flight.”

  He swats dismissively at an invisible gnat.

  “The Ansible, ach. Its purposes, origins, possible uses. All vague. Even its shape. How do you verify something that cannot be photographed? How do you quantify something that leaves no footprint in digital data?”

  “You must be pleased your facility was chosen. Out of all the particle accelerators in the world.”

  “Only we generate sufficient synchrotron radiation. This peculiarity could only be investigated here.”

  “A peculiarity that could threaten your business model.”

  Faster-than-light communications? A project Oliphant and the Americans have been working on in secret.

  “Come now, what business model could compete against free and unlimited? As for the supposed properties of this inscrutable object?” Licht shakes his head. “It was plucked from an ice chamber at the bottom of the world barely a year ago. What it might be, where it originated, may never be fully explained.”

  Licht smiles harder.

  “Ancient Egyptians knew about electricity. They described it accurately. Commercial light bulbs had to wait until the 1880s.” Licht leaves his desk. “Now, you have come a long way, and your forte is neither science nor business, is it?”

  “Mostly politics.”

  “Your wife is a prominent lawyer for the opposition party in your home country, correct?”

  The intense younger man’s handsome features are decidedly marred by dark circles around his eyes. Jet lag. Licht almo
st feels sorry for him.

  “You seem to have done your research. I am flattered. Perhaps you were intending to interview me.”

  Licht chuckles. Dry irony is his favorite type of humor.

  “My press secretary agreed to certain questions. But let’s throw away the script, like they say in the vulgar reality shows. We will just talk. Man to man.”

  Shara looks like he’s won some kind of journalist lottery.

  “Have a seat by the fireplace.”

  “Shall we begin?” Shara takes out a 3-D recorder the size and shape of a box of playing cards. “On the record?”

  “Darauf kannst du Gift nehmen.”

  You can take poison on that.

  21

  “Ah yes, Doktor, ‘I can bet my life on that.’”

  Shara’s profile says he knows German to a B-1 level. This appears to include well-known sayings.

  Licht is proud of his hearth. It has been described as garish, pompous, and even grotesque by architectural writers who couldn’t make a living designing cesspools. Tons of Swedish crystal form a flue curving 108 feet to the ceiling, making it taller than Bernini’s papal altar. Below, a mythic winged creature sits on a flaming nest. Thorn vines hold it in place.

  The effect he wanted was a zealous tension between the desire of the flying creature to leap into the air and the cruel twisting of the vines holding it back. Microscopic details, leaves and feathers, were carved by laser etching. They reflect frozen motion. The torments of time and burden of dreams made gargantuan and transparent.

  The nest is a bonfire. It can voraciously consume wood, gas, coal, or biofuel, depending on the bouquet of light desired. Thorns channel each wavelength into pleasing shapes throughout the huge room. Today it is dark and cold.

  “I don’t suppose anyone asks you what time it is here,” Shara says cheekily.

  The floor and walls of the vast room form a macrocosmic astronomical clock. It includes human-sized figures of the apostles and Death, which come out of hidden alcoves to strike the hours. Shara studies dials and numbers under the floor, which is made of transparent aluminum.

  “Solar, lunar, even siderisch—star based time—is measured. To me the Prague orloj has always represented man’s desire for mechanical mastery over raw universal forces. Lichtwerks’ mission.”

  “Remarkable,” Shara says, probably genuinely impressed.

  “How can we step out of time without first finding ourselves within it?”

  “Aren’t there some forces man should never control?”

  “Nonsense. The only inexhaustible resource is mankind’s ignorance and an equal and offsetting capacity to master the elements. Will alone can tip the balance. That goes for all the light we can see and the greater part we cannot.”

  The LED on Shara’s recorder oscillates as it perceives inbound sound waves. For once, Licht can speak his mind.

  “To say we must not do wrong is totally off the point. Scientific advancements cannot do wrong. Questionable consequences are the result of weak passions. Where there is mastery, there is only Wohltätigkeit. Beneficence. The charity of dreamers.”

  “Would you say that to the people involved with your early injectable SIM-card experiments, the ones who lost arms?”

  Shara is verbally aggressive. Licht approves.

  “Ah, the terrible price of progress. How many arms and legs and lives were lost during the Industrial Revolution? In 2010, United Nations aid workers brought cholera to Haiti. A million people got sick, ten thousand died. All while the UN were merely trying to restore the upscale squalor that existed before an earthquake.

  “All people affected by early versions of my ‘You are the Phone’ campaign were in developing countries. The politically correct reference for the overpopulated, backward third world. These uneducated people couldn’t possibly understand my guiding precepts. They received monetary settlements. We’ve also given the injured volunteers free Licht/Net upgrades for life. They made out well.”

  The journalist is shocked and elated. He checks the holographic recording device on the table between them. A miniature Licht and miniature Shara pause and look at a blank space between them. The device records everything except its own image.

  Shara thinks he has caught his subject making a horrible mistake on the record. He must be imagining his byline on the front page of London’s deplorable rag, the Citizen Juggernaut.

  Licht is just warming up.

  “I will go further. The Lichtphone amputees should be proud of their sacrifice. They are volunteer soldiers wounded in the war on ignorance and poverty in all forms.”

  “They should be…? Are you saying they should feel good about losing a limb so that you can make more money?”

  Licht rolls his eyes.

  “You have just reconfirmed something: Only the very rich can rise above the pettiness and, yes, the sinfulness of greed and avarice. Mr. Shara, I have my own reserve currency issued by my own nation. After the Eurozone collapsed, the Lichtstrom currency unit bailed out bankrupt countries. The trading volume of virtual Lichtcredits today is more than all the major currencies combined.”

  “Isn’t that because you do business with states and entities banned from using other banks? Don’t ninety percent of transactions in street drugs like Red Mist involve Lichtcredits?”

  “I personally switched on high-speed mobile communications for nearly six billion people who did not have any bars on their obsolete phones because they have no money. I did not care. My struggle is not, and never will be, about base Zahlungsmittel. It is about humanity. The Lichtstrom is the first nation founded on pure information. We produce nothing. We see everything.”

  Licht pours a glass of ionized water. Shara does not drink spirits. Even so, in about eight minutes, his guest may be tempted to down the whole contents of the crystal liquor cabinet.

  “Ignorance and isolation are today’s polio. For millennia, people fought against that terrible disease. There is no natural cure. There is no resistance that can be bred into a population. Only by the domination of the natural environment by the intellect was it conquered in the first world. There were mistakes. Even horrible accidents that left people dead or painfully paralyzed.

  “Today, the third world is treated to the Sabin live virus vaccine. Not the Salk protocol, the only one allowed by law in civilized countries. Cheaper medicines have kept strains of the disease alive and kicking in countries such as yours, Mr. Shara. This guarantees a healthy annual profit to certain pharmaceutical concerns, doesn’t it?”

  His guest takes the bait.

  “My newsgroup published extensively on the differing standards of care for developing nations like mine. I am a nationalist, and I believe 300 million Indonesians deserve the same respect and dignity as anyone else on the planet.”

  Shara shakes his head as if to stop it from spinning. “Are you seriously comparing yourself to Jonas Salk, one of the greatest selfless benefactors in human history?”

  “I am indeed. And more,” Licht says, his enthusiasm rises. “I insist everyone all over the world have the same access to communications, ubiquitous and free, as everyone else. I have made communications a basic human right. When the pope in the Vatican speaks with the president of France, they are using the same system you use to update your wife’s shopping lists. Just like Salk, who refused to patent his vaccine asking, ‘could you patent the sun?’ I have registered no proprietary processes.”

  “As a result, you don’t have to tell anyone how your system works.” Shara checks his notes. “It took years for the Antarctic IceCube Observatory to witness a single neutrino. These strange particles can pass through a light-year of solid lead without leaving a trace. The Lichtstrom uses them like radio waves. Would you care to share those secrets now, on the record?”

  Tiresome. Licht looks at the clockwork. Soon the grim reaper will step out to chime the passing hour.

  “Why don’t you ask me what you came all this way for?”

  Shara ret
urned a stare, coy under its blankness.

  “Time is wasting. You have less than you believe.”

  Shara glances at the doorway. His hand moves toward sunglasses in his jacket pocket. It is his backup recording device.

  Mr. Shara, if you needed to be dead, you would have been disposed of by grubby people I never have the slightest contact with.

  “Your wife has a long friendship with the Indonesian opposition leader, Mr. Banten. You have painstakingly assembled proof Lichtwerks has for years blackmailed your government into doing my bidding. You are working on a series of articles, even a book, on this subject. You also have some intriguing speculation as to Lichtwerks’s involvement in certain coups and civil wars. Correct?”

  “If you knew that, why—”

  “Mr. Shara, if you would listen more and jabber less, you would not be in your predicament. I speak very little. I influence, I manipulate, I extort politicians and oligarchs. Anyone significant. How could I not?

  “When I invented light-based communication, it was inevitable that governments would lust for the knowledge that flowed, photon by photon, through my servers. Every Licht/Net-enabled light bulb is a data hub.

  “The old internet is a backwater cesspool. Useless. Its fiber-optic cables desolate, populated only by perverts glued to their sick pornography and by pathetically debauched online gamers.

  “Countries like your Indonesia with large populations and weak infrastructure were only too happy to accept my gifts. No more expensive Wi-Fi towers or impractical airships. With Licht/Net, connecting is as simple as screwing in a light bulb. Even the least of you can do that.”

  Mr. Shara sits, speechless.

  The hour ticks.

  Mirrors in a wall alcove that had appeared solid part. Human-sized clockwork sculptures begin their procession. Exquisitely crafted and painted, they are propelled by the finest gears, springs, and levers. Licht fancies himself both clockwork element and creator.