Emergence

by Hammond, Ray

  ‘Fred, Moleculture has only recently joined the group. We acquired you in . . .’

  ‘Last February,’ supplied Zimmer.

  ‘Well, we do things a little differently in the Tye Corporation and, well, I guess that’s why we’re the Tye Corporation.’ Tye smiled and turned to Connie, who was making notes in her DigiPad. Like every other aspect of corporate activity within the company, all Thomas Tye’s waking moments were videoed. But the recordings of this meeting, like the rest of his life, would not be filed in the corporate database of intellectual property. He was the only exception to company policy for the simple reason that plausible deniability was a vital option for him.

  ‘How much of the world’s population is covered by the UN Resolution on GM crop testing?’

  Zimmer shrugged. Most countries had signed the agreement to control trials of new genetically modified foods strictly. ‘Ninety per cent or so, I would think, Tom.’

  ‘It’s less than sixty per cent on a per capita basis, Fred. China, Angola, Zimbabwe, Russia, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan and even Pakistan – none of them have ratified the agreement. They see it as yet another power play by the West. There are governments with millions of square miles of land who will be ready and eager to help with your field trials. And they’ve got the populations who most need your creations, your miracle crops, Fred. We can patch your data into the Halcyon climate-modelling system and the Phoebus Project can supply the energy. You will be able to feed the world. You’ll all get an invitation to Stockholm – for a Nobel Prize!’

  Zimmer was a sufficiently good judge of character simply to nod his agreement. He was also crucially aware that the final (and largest) part of the payment for his Moleculture shares – and for the shares that had been owned by his wife and the others on the team – wasn’t due for another two years.

  ‘You just start mass-producing the seeds and leave the government permissions to me,’ said Tye. ‘I’d like to see this being tested on a small scale within two months, with very large-scale plantings for this autumn. I will be able to give you as much land as you want. We can start with a planting area of four hundred thousand hectares.’

  They gazed at him, open-mouthed.

  ‘We couldn’t even administer such large-scale production from Cambridge, or anywhere else in the UK or Europe,’ objected Professor Morton at last. He had never even contemplated such industrial-scale planting. ‘That would be a technical breach of EU and UN Food and Agriculture guidelines.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you brought that up, Oliver,’ responded Tye, turning to face the scientist. ‘I want you to move this facility to our campus on Hope Island. There’s quite a sizeable science park and you’ll find some interesting people there in your own field – people who are putting nocturnal genes into cows, pigs and sheep. Yes, farm animals that run around at night, feeding and growing! You’ll love it!’

  There was silence as everybody in the room stared at him, appalled.

  He turned to face the team. ‘You’ll love it! You’ll all love it!’ he said, nodding vigorously, willing it so. He took a small aerosol from his pocket and sprayed the inside of his mouth. ‘We’ll expect you in two weeks, plants and all. Connie will get Logistics to take care of the details. Your families can follow later.’

  *

  ‘This is truly astonishing,’ agreed Jack, as he finished the last page of the report Haley had given him. He was struggling to control outward expressions of his surprise at the lengths to which Tom had gone in his quest for youth and vigour. Like others in the inner circle he had suspected, but this seemed to be proof. ‘Incredible.’

  While he had been reading, Haley had first made coffee, then, later, sandwiches and tea. He put the report down and turned to where she was sitting cross-legged, facing him at the other end of the long sofa.

  ‘And you don’t know where this came from?’

  She shook her head as she reached down and picked up her coffee mug from a low table. ‘It just arrived in the post – snail mail, from Amsterdam. There was no indication of a sender.’

  ‘I know of one of the authors named on the cover,’ revealed Jack. ‘He’s a geneticist – on the island. I might be able to check whether he really did write this.’

  ‘I’m told it’s scientifically accurate,’ affirmed Haley. ‘My boyfriend’s a genetics researcher.’

  Why did those words suddenly feel so bad? She looked up and found his steady gaze on her. She pressed on, quickly. ‘It’s written by people who know what they are talking about.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ mused Jack, wondering if he should share any of the concerns that had been building up inside him; the concerns that were one of the reasons he had sought the biographer out. ‘This would certainly explain the way he looks and behaves.’

  He paused, still cautious, still unable to break the habit of secrecy that had been drummed into him throughout his adult life. Everything he had discovered during his research about the British biographer led him to believe she was a woman of integrity. He looked up, conscious of her dark eyes on him – eyes that were startlingly direct and, he realized, disturbing. It was really those eyes that had brought him here today.

  ‘It’s true to say that TT spends a lot of his time with our drug companies and the researchers,’ he continued, measuring his comments carefully.

  ‘He’s the world’s biggest private investor in biotechnology,’ exclaimed Haley. ‘Look, I’ve created a map.’

  She stood, walked across to her desk and climbed onto a chair. She peeled back a piece of sticky tape that was holding one corner of a large sheet to the wall. Jack walked to the other side of the desk and, at her nod, peeled back the other corner almost without stretching. She smiled as she jumped down from her chair. Jack stepped back to view what was revealed.

  The wall was covered with photos, clippings and notes on Thomas Tye, the Tye Corporation, its subsidiaries and Tye’s private investments. In the centre was a web of interconnected map pins showing the links between the Tye Corporation, Tye himself and many private companies and organizations. A large map of Hope Island was pinned in the centre.

  Jack stood in front of her wall and shook his head in wonder. ‘You’re still working with ordinary paper?’

  Haley smiled. ‘No, I research on the networks like everybody else. I also read some types of book on digital paper but there is something special about seeing it all laid out together in this way. It’s to do with the psychophysics of the cognitive process.’

  Jack shot her a look and she laughed, unable to tell whether he was teasing her. She liked the hint of laughter that often seemed to hover around his eyes.

  ‘You see connections you’d miss otherwise,’ she explained with a smile.

  He stepped forward to examine the material more carefully.

  ‘This is cute,’ he teased as he flicked an old pin-up shot of Thomas Tye that had been clipped from a women’s magazine. ‘Were you a fan in those days?’

  Haley couldn’t prevent embarrassment painting her cheeks. In earlier years she had even participated in auctions of Tye memorabilia: faded autographs and signed pictures from his more accessible days were scattered amongst her research. She justified it to herself as trying to feel the man about whom she was writing, a form of graptomancy.

  Jack allowed his question to hang unanswered and he ran his finger along the cotton connections that tied development projects to the various Tye companies.

  ‘There’s a lot more aerospace stuff than this,’ he cautioned. ‘A hell of a lot more. And you’re way behind on network development. Northern Russia is complete now.’

  ‘Well, the legal issues have been taking a lot of my time.’

  ‘I presume that’s the idea,’ said Jack.

  Chapter Two

  Hope Island was twelve miles long by eight miles wide but, ever since it was first named by British privateers in the seventeenth century, it had never delivered on its implied promise. Situated in the Windward Passa
ge midway between Cuba and Haiti, this uninhabited Antillean island had held out the hope of being the ideal first landfall and staging post for voyages between the Old World and the Caribbean. But, as scores of successive landing parties were to discover, the promise of its verdant slopes and white beaches remained unfulfilled. Other than occasional rainfall, there was no fresh water.

  Over three centuries the Spanish, French, British and Americans all fought desultory naval skirmishes over ownership of the formerly volcanic island. But, as it offered neither strategic advantage nor revictualling anchorage, none of the protagonists really had their hearts in winning those brief engagements. As a result, it remained loosely under the supervision of the regional French administration in Port-au-Prince until Haiti gained its independence in 1804. Then, following a display of complete indifference by its former owners, the new Haitian Republic inherited responsibility for the useless lump of rock.

  The island remained under Haitian control until January 1962 when ownership was secretly exchanged for an astonishing and wholly unprecedented six million US dollars. Soviet intelligence had identified Hope Island as being an ideal covert site for two hardened underground missile silos. It was a mere five hundred miles from the Florida coastline and the rich and decadent American cities beyond. Such proximity would neutralize the dangerous advantage the Americans had gained with their long-range rocket delivery systems and would provide a powerful deterrent against the widely anticipated US invasion of Cuba. Fidel Castro was quickly funded to strike the deal with his neighbour and despot rival, the Haitian dictator ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier.

  Five months later, acting on information gathered by a CIA spy inside Cuba’s Central Planning Board who insisted that Russian engineers had arrived in force, American U2 reconnaissance aircraft started to photograph the outlines of new building activity across Cuba. By September the planes’ cameras had captured images of the construction sites of twenty-nine new missile silos including, by a remarkably lucky accidental overfly, two deep excavations and an airstrip on Hope Island. The new and highly secret Corona spy satellite was deployed to pass over the Western Caribbean every forty-one minutes. It immediately revealed that twenty-four medium-range missiles had already been deployed and further weapons were being delivered and readied at the rate of six a week. Within a fortnight the CIA analysts had finished their report and concluded that there would soon be sufficient megatonnage sited in the Antilles to obliterate all of America’s East Coast.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff urged the US president to make an immediate, massive and unannounced pre-emptive knockout nuclear strike on this highly dangerous and untrustworthy commie neighbour. Only the year before the new president and the CIA had been humiliated when their covertly funded and organized ‘arms-length’ invasion of Cuba by ‘exiles’ had been trounced by well-trained Cuban troops led by Ché Guevara. Eleven hundred men had been captured at the aptly named Bay of Pigs and, amidst international derision, Fidel Castro had managed to extract a ransom of food and medicines worth fifty-three million dollars from the United States for their release. This seemed like an ideal opportunity to exact retribution.

  President John F. Kennedy ignored such urgings to apocalyptic revenge but did issue an ultimatum to Nikita Khrushchev. He ordered US warships and submarines to mount a naval blockade across the Windward Passage to stop Soviet ships delivering further missiles to fill the silos on Hope Island and those being completed on mainland Cuba. For two days the world had hung on the brink of global thermonuclear war as twenty-six Soviet missile-laden freighters doggedly continued to plough their way through the world’s oceans towards the Caribbean. Then, on 14 October 1962, after a secret reciprocal deal was agreed under which American Jupiter missiles in Turkey would also be withdrawn, the United States made a public commitment never to invade Castro’s fledgling communist state and all Soviet ships en route to the West Indies received orders to return to their home bases.

  Almost half a century later, Cuba’s crumbling government made an unexpected profit on the Cold War purchase it had almost forgotten. A personal representative of the Tye Corporation’s Bahamian lawyers visited Havana and, in a prearranged private audience with the minister of the interior, offered the government two hundred million dollars for the outright sale of the island. The minister and his aides could think of no reason why the giant corporation should want an uninhabited, anhydrous island on the edge of the world’s worst hurricane corridor.

  Before responding, the minister ordered a naval survey team to re-examine the island. Although the team included the best seismologists, mineralogists, geologists and petrochemical surveyors the nation’s impoverished universities could muster, nothing was found that could warrant any further government interest in the island. The old silos had long since been sealed and nothing of any salvage value remained.

  Accordingly, Cuba’s Government of National Reconciliation reaffirmed the island’s strategic importance to the Republic and offered the corporation a ninety-nine-year lease for six hundred million dollars. As part of the deal Cuba would remain the sovereign protector while retaining all mineral and petrochemical rights. The Tye Corporation’s lawyers insisted on an outright sale with no residual rights, but increased their offer to four hundred million dollars. Their terms included Cuban recognition of Hope Island’s sovereignty and the cession of cabotage rights over its airspace.

  There was also to be a six-mile exclusion zone for Cuban-registered shipping, the aircraft of Empressa Cubana de Aviacion and the Cuban air force. In response to the Cuban request for an explanation about the intended use of the territory in question, the lawyers said that the company’s initial plans were for the creation of an exclusive resort island, but their clients naturally reserved the right to put their future territory to whatever peaceable purpose they chose.

  With his inner cabinet, the minister debated whether they could bluff the company into a much higher bid. The Chief of the Armed Forces objected to the sale at any price, pointing out that Hope Island provided the nation’s first line of eastern defence.

  ‘Defence against whom?’ sneered the education minister. ‘The ganja warriors of the banana islands?’

  The general’s objections were noted but overruled.

  The cabinet then discussed the economic feasibility of even such a rich organization as the Tye Corporation being able to supply all the necessities needed for a resort complex to a piece of Atlantic rock forty kilometres from the nearest source of fresh water.

  Finally, reality prevailed. Since the collapse of world communism over a decade earlier and the consequential loss of billions of dollars a year in Soviet aid, Cuba’s economy had remained in deep crisis. Overseas markets for cane sugar, citrus fruits and tobacco – the island’s most important exports – were declining as other producers were able to invest capital to create new and more efficient production techniques. Despite its rich natural resources the country was starving and tremors of insurgency were once again being felt in the provinces.

  It was agreed that the government Estate Office should respond by asking for eight hundred million dollars for an outright sale but, in the event of the Tye Corporation withdrawing, Havana should immediately accept the four hundred million dollars previously offered. The only absolute condition insisted on by the Cubans was that the island could never be used for military purposes and, other than the forces required for coastal protection, should never be used as a base for any form of weaponry or troops from any other nation. The Havana government also sought and received an undertaking that Hope Island’s new owners would not offer refuge or transit access to any Cuban citizens who might land up on their shore.

  The deal was finally done for five hundred and eighty million dollars. Despite requests for delay from his army of international lawyers, who pointed out the delicate negotiations that would be required for international recognition of the world’s first corporate sovereignty to be established since 1796, Thomas Tye landed on Hope Island to begin h
is personal and corporate eloignment from the United States a day after the cession documents were signed in Havana and the cash had been deposited according to the seller’s instructions.

  Throughout the second day and the days that followed, the Tye corporate flight of four Tye-Westland LoadShifter helicopters ferried staff, equipment and portable accommodation units between the island and Cristoba, a small private airfield to the west of the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo.

  By the end of the fourth day the engineers announced that a total of 10,000 gallons of pure fresh water at 23°C was springing from their forty-two new boreholes each minute. Nobody was surprised. Infrared images of the island taken by the Tye Corporation’s Argus Satellite Network had clearly shown three large freshwater springs emerging in the coastal seabed around the island. A careful analysis of flow rates and direction coupled with computer-enhanced satellite geodesy had enabled a small, but very expensive, hydrology consultancy from Mobile, Alabama to land secretly six months earlier and drill two carefully positioned deep test-bores through the island’s reheated sulphided limestone. The engineers then took samples, plugged the boreholes and capped them invisibly before confirming the results to the Tye Corporation. Thomas Tye was discovering the pleasure of betting on certainties.

  Thirteen years later the entire world had come to know of Hope Island. It had become the world’s first corporately owned nation state since the East India Company had reluctantly handed over its subcontinent to a young but implacable British monarch in 1858. After Cuba recognized the state’s sovereignty as part of the purchase deal, the Tye Corporation privately agreed a massive technology transfer with the government of the People’s Republic of China to secure recognition by twenty-one nations within the Sino sphere of influence.