Sunfall

by Jim Al-Khalili

  ‘How can you possibly call this fun? Who else knows about it?’

  ‘Just you and me, of course, you idiot. And it’s going to stay that way.’ For now, she thought to herself. It all depended what the files contained.

  ‘Well, now I really wish you hadn’t shared any of this with me, Reenie. It’s too much of a responsibility. I mean, if this works then you’ve most likely just put both our lives in danger.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a drama queen, Hajji. When I’m finished, I’ll make sure I erase every last qubit of data and code from your system. I’ll be out of your hair – if you had any – and you can go get your beauty sleep.’ She pulled down the visor again and put on the gloves. ‘Now, this should only take a few minutes.’ She compiled the cloning code and, after a quick run through her checklist, set it running.

  Five minutes later she sat bolt upright and let out a whoop of triumph. She couldn’t quite believe she’d done it. She now had stored deep in her dark-web file system the passwords that would unlock data no human other than a chosen few was meant to see. She recognized that whatever was in those files was so sensitive that she dreaded to think what might happen to her if she was ever found out. For the time being she had no intention of accessing the files. So, she spent the next few minutes covering her tracks and deleting all trace of her evening’s activities.

  Finally satisfied, she ripped off her visor and gloves and stretched her legs out. She glanced over at Majid. He looked like he was still sulking. ‘I have a really bad feeling about this,’ he muttered.

  She stood up, suddenly feeling exhausted. ‘Thanks for this, Hajji. I’ll see you tomorrow morning, OK?’ And then she added, ‘It’s going to be fine, I promise.’ She leaned over and kissed her friend on the top of his head. He looked up at her and smiled weakly.

  She walked out of the apartment without waiting for a reply and closed the door behind her.

  Stepping out into the late-evening air, she felt elated and full of nervous excitement. She would open the files as soon as she got home. She just hoped that whatever they contained wouldn’t stop her getting to sleep. Tomorrow, she would have to go to her classes as normal, as though nothing was any different.

  She got in her car, told it to take her home, then began humming to herself.

  Within minutes of Shireen’s departure, a black van pulled up outside Majid’s apartment. Oblivious to the chain of events that were already unfolding, Shireen could not know that her life, and her friend’s, were about to be turned upside down.

  8

  Thursday, 7 February – Cat Island, Bahamas

  Frank Pedersen had been checking the weather updates since he’d woken at six. He’d been following the news of the storm that was building in the Atlantic and which was heading his way. It certainly didn’t look very pretty out there. After half an hour working up a sweat in his gym, he’d eaten a large bowl of muesli and had a cold shower. It was such a warm and muggy morning he was soon sweating again through his T-shirt. He now prowled from room to room like a caged cat, not able to settle or take his mind off the approaching storm.

  Frank Pedersen wasn’t the sort of man to feel anxious. He’d pretty much always got what he’d wanted in life, and on those few occasions when there was worrying to be done, he’d left it to others. In fact, it could be said that one of his skills was to surround himself with professional worry absorbers. Over the years, people had debated whether his success was due to serendipity, brilliance or sheer perseverance – the truth being a combination of all three. He’d made his first million by the age of nineteen and his first billion by twenty-six. He hadn’t achieved this by being particularly ruthless either; just by being … well … lucky, brilliant and hard-working. Even before he went to California, his entrepreneurial skills, combined with his keen eye for the next big thing in computing, had attracted lucrative job offers from several up-and-coming tech companies. That was at the turn of the millennium when a lot of smart, computer-savvy young people were beginning to shape the course of history. But even though he was eager to get over to Silicon Valley to be part of the IT revolution, Frank wanted to do things his way, which he duly did. Much to his parents’ initial disappointment, he’d left Aarhus for San Francisco and never looked back. Throughout his career, he never deliberately courted or achieved the fame or star quality of others of his generation, such as Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Page and Brin, but then his self-belief meant he had only ever needed to impress one person: himself.

  Now, with two marriages behind him, a business empire that pretty much ran itself and no more mountains left to climb, he had taken early semi-retirement to enjoy the quiet solitude of his own company and his two German shepherds in a secluded villa on top of a hill on a remote Caribbean island. The villa had originally been a hermitage, built by a Roman Catholic priest just before the Second World War, which he had instantly fallen in love with. Although he had spent millions converting the old building into a twenty-first-century fortress, he had refused to invest in a decent road up from the small town of New Bight, a few kilometres away on the west coast of the island, deciding that he preferred the isolation afforded by the steep rocky climb to reach him. Not that Frank Pedersen thought of himself as a recluse – forty-five years of keeping his finger on the technological pulse of the planet wasn’t an addiction he wished to be cured of. Anyway, who was ever truly alone these days?

  But he was feeling pretty cut off and alone this morning. This storm was looking increasingly ugly. Truth be told, it had been a pretty unremarkable hurricane season, with fewer than the average number of tropical cyclones being promoted to hurricane status. One of the consequences of the changes to the Earth’s climate over the previous two decades had been the extension of the traditional autumn Atlantic hurricane season well into December, and even January. However, this new one, quickly dubbed Hurricane Jerome, was late by any standards. Not only that, but it had skipped several stages in the usual life-cycle of such storms, which would typically build up from depression, through tropical storm, to full-blown hurricane within a matter of several days. Instead, it had jumped from nothing to a category five in just a few hours.

  Yesterday evening, when he first heard the news of the storm, he’d been advised by friends and associates back in California to get the hell out. After all, it was their job to worry about him. His heli had been flown over to the island and sat waiting on the tarmac six kilometres away. A quick call from him and it could have been at the Hermitage in a matter of minutes to whisk him away to safety. However, he insisted this was an unnecessary precaution and had instead ordered it to fly back to Florida, five hundred kilometres away, without him. He’d experienced six hurricane seasons on Cat Island and had never seen the need to flee, preferring to stick it out here just like he always did. After all, the Hermitage was designed to withstand anything nature might throw at it, particularly since he’d had its walls reinforced with criss-cross beams of a steel–graphene alloy, making it no more likely to blow over than the hill itself. And its situation at the top of Como Hill meant that, unlike the town below, it was safely above the high-point of even the most formidable tsunami. Nevertheless, this morning he was starting to feel that his decision to stay might have been somewhat imprudent. And Frank Pedersen never made imprudent decisions.

  The dogs were showing signs of anxiety too. It might have been something they could smell in the air or just that they were feeding off Frank’s unease. Unusually for her, Beth was curled up quietly beneath the living-room table with her nose tucked under her tail and just one brown eye following Frank around the room. Sheba paced around after him wanting to be made a fuss of all the time.

  He turned around to look at them and, hands on hips in mock exasperation, spoke in a stern voice. ‘You’re being such babies. Go on outside and run around a bit while the weather’s still OK.’ Christ knows how long they were all going to be cooped indoors once the storm hit. He opened the door for them, but they just sat where they were and looke
d at him suspiciously. ‘Suit yourselves.’ Before closing the door, he stepped outside himself. The world seemed so quiet, but not in a peaceful way. Unusually for his hilltop, he noticed there was no wind at all, nor, rather more surreally, any of the usual chirping of birds or buzzing of insects in the bushes around the Hermitage. The thick grey cloud above him seemed almost solid in texture, and so low he could almost jump up and touch it. The air felt heavy and suspenseful. It was as if the world was full of pent-up energy, like a compressed spring waiting to be released.

  He wandered back in, closed the door and went to the kitchen for a beer. Ten o’clock in the morning wasn’t too early, was it? Of course it wasn’t. And it might help cure him of his stupid jitters.

  He’d bought the Hermitage eleven years ago and it had taken him five years to renovate it – essentially to transform it from a crumbling stone shell to a high-tech luxury villa. For years before he’d bought it, it had served as no more than a tourist destination, mainly on account of it being situated at the highest point in all of the Bahamas – or rather, of what was left of the Bahamas, since the rising sea level had consumed almost three quarters of the islands’ land. Frank had always enjoyed his holidays in the Caribbean and had happily donated hundreds of millions of dollars of his personal wealth to relief funds over the years. In fact, Cat Island, where he had decided to settle, had emerged remarkably unscathed by virtue of protruding a few tens of metres higher above the water than the other islands.

  He took out a bottle of Kalik from the fridge and twisted off the cap, then wandered back to check yet again for a weather update. The centre of the living room was taken up with a real-time, high-resolution, three-dimensional hologram of Hurricane Jerome. Frank stood in front of it and took a deep swig from the bottle. The swirling mass of cloud was spinning slowly and dragging its spiral arms like tentacles around its edges. It certainly looked like one mean motherfucker. There were interspersed flashes of light at the bottom where lightning discharged the storm’s huge electrical energy into the sea. He found it interesting that the hurricane’s name was the same as that of the priest who’d built his hermitage; the Right Reverend Monsignor John Hawes had also been known locally on the island as Father Jerome.

  Meteorologists were already claiming that Jerome should be designated a category seven. When he’d first settled on Cat Island, Frank had taken a serious interest in hurricane classification and was aware that a new category six had recently been added beyond the previous highest five, which had been deemed insufficient to describe hurricanes with wind speeds over 280 kilometres per hour, as had been recorded with increasing regularity in recent years. This morning, drones and satellites tracking Jerome had recorded sustained wind speeds of well over 350 kilometres per hour.

  He flicked through the different networks on his holo display and stopped at the BBC News Channel. Frank stood and watched as a young meteorologist explained in a very excited voice what was so special about this particular superhurricane:

  ‘Scientists have known for over a century that galactic cosmic rays – subatomic particles reaching us from deep space – could adversely affect the weather on Earth, but they were mostly of academic interest only. After all, the Earth’s magnetic field has always done its job of deflecting most of these particles before they got too close to the Earth’s surface.

  ‘The only other group of people they had been of any concern to were satellite manufacturers who had to build in appropriate shielding to avoid their sensitive electronics being fried. But now, the conjunction of two occurrences is having a dramatic effect never experienced before by humankind.’

  Frank was well aware that his own business empire relied critically on the reliability of communication satellites, and while none of his own had been affected by the CME that had struck over India last week, he was becoming increasingly worried about the potential risks of the weakened magnetic field. The meteorologist meanwhile was now in full explainer mode.

  ‘Firstly, the Sun happens to be going through its solar minimum right now, the low-activity stage of its eleven-year cycle, which means that its own magnetic field, the Heliosphere, is much weaker, so the number of galactic cosmic rays that can now reach the Earth is higher.

  ‘Secondly, the dramatic weakening of the Earth’s field itself, which we have been hearing a lot about of late, means that these cosmic rays can penetrate to much lower levels of the atmosphere, ionizing the air, which in turn seeds thick, giant clouds.

  ‘This increased ionization also causes the electrical conduction of the lower atmosphere to increase dramatically, creating exceptional temperature and pressure gradients over heights of just a few kilometres. Our models predict that already violent storms are able to feed off this electrical energy. To make matters worse, over this past week astronomers have observed a sharp spike in the intensity of cosmic rays hitting the Earth, and are busy trying to locate the source. I’m told, and this is of course not my area, that a powerful supernova, an exploding star in a nearby galaxy, may be responsible.’

  Frank was beginning to feel a little incredulous. Having to cope with higher levels of radiation, even hurricanes, was one thing, but ‘exploding stars in nearby galaxies’? Come on. Seriously?

  ‘In any case, this sudden surge in cosmic ray intensity is giving us some interesting, to say the least, weather conditions. And this is now evident over the mid-Atlantic, where dramatic changes in atmospheric conditions are having a profound effect on the hurricane season. The warming ocean has already resulted in more severe, and frequent, storms, but it appears that Hurricane Jerome is the first true superstorm to draw on this vast new source of energy from space. It’s basically plugging into the power source of distant exploding stars. And as we can see, the results are quite stunning.’

  ‘Stunning’ might be an adjective appropriate for someone safely watching from the other side of the world, but when you were in the hurricane’s path …

  ‘If anything, Hurricane Jerome is just getting started. Thousands of metres above the sea, more and more storm clouds are now coalescing and joining its giant swirling vortex. The winds in its outer wall are at this moment sweeping across the ocean in a circle twelve hundred kilometres in diameter, at well over a hundred and sixty kilometres per hour, whipping it up; and this is combined with exceptionally low atmospheric pressure just above the surface of the water. This means …’

  Frank had heard enough. He turned away, commanding the holo off as he did so. Normally so rational and logical, he decided that discretion was the better part of valour and that it was probably time to head for the safety of the wine cellar. He wandered around the villa collecting together the few essential supplies he’d need for a day or two underground: bedding, food and water for him and the dogs, several LED lamps, the portable holo, an induction charger and a couple of e-pads. He hadn’t been confident that his net drones would be safe enough above the storm and had already commanded them back to the mainland. This, of course, meant that his connectivity to the outside world was going to be patchy, particularly underneath several metres of rock.

  So confident had he been in the past about the solidity of the Hermitage that he had never felt the need for a dedicated storm shelter. In any case, unlike the stone buildings above it, the wine cellar was carved out of the rock of the hill itself. But he had also never felt it necessary to stock the cellar up with emergency supplies on the off-chance he ever had to use it. Well, now he did.

  What he missed right now was Maisie, his assistant, on whom he relied increasingly these days to organize his life and ensure that the ‘little things’ were taken care of. During the lengthy periods that he now spent out here at the Hermitage, Maisie would come over for a full day every week to make sure he wasn’t entirely neglecting his businesses and that he wasn’t in need of anything. Now, she was hundreds of kilometres away and Frank was having to think for himself. But he felt confident that he had everything he needed for what might be a couple of days. The wine cellar,
true to its primary purpose, was as perfect a place as anywhere to spend some time.

  It had originally been a crypt, though Frank had no idea whether anyone had been entombed there, nor what had become of the bodies if they had – although it still had the words ‘Blessed are the Dead Who Die in the Lord’ carved on a large block of granite above the entrance. To reach it involved going outside, crossing the courtyard and descending several roughly chiselled steps to approach from the side of the rocky outcrop on which the Hermitage was built. Frank had had a thick oak door put in to replace the metal gate that had previously blocked the entrance. So, his wine collection, last valued at well over a million dollars, was safe within the crypt’s cool and dry conditions.

  The dogs had initially been reluctant to abandon the safety of the house and had taken some coaxing. Then, when he had left them in the cellar to return to the house for a few more bits and pieces, they had started howling, clearly spooked by the approaching storm.

  Finally secure, with vault door safely closed, Frank could hear that it had started raining heavily. The wind had suddenly picked up too and was now howling around the building above his head. He mentally ran through his checklist to make sure he’d not forgotten any crucial items he might need. Although if he had, it was too late anyway – there was no way he would be going back up now.

  He decided it was as good a time as any to sample one of his prize wines and he strolled down the dimly lit passageways past arrays of dusty wine bottles stacked from floor to ceiling – which was only one and a half metres high at the sides, but arched up to three metres down the middle of the passages. The place had a strange smell. It was more than just a dry, stale mustiness and Frank had always found it slightly unnerving. It was an imperceptibly faint, sweet stench of rot, as though the place wanted to cling to its original role as a resting place for the decaying flesh of long-dead inhabitants of the island, and that Frank and his precious wine collection were merely temporary intruders.