by Hammond, Ray
Tye also neglected to mention that rumours about life on Hope Island had become so persistent, so extreme, so exaggerated and so sensational in the poverty-beset Caribbean that what had started years before as an initial trickle of uninvited but hopeful immigrants from Cuba was now growing to become a severe problem. Cuba was now once again in the grip of civil war. Each night Jack Hendriksen’s 200-strong local security force had to be ready to deal with dozens of unauthorized landings by small craft, some of them no more than planks of wood strapped over empty oil drums. Despite the best surveillance systems in the world a few of them succeeded in landing undetected, economic refugees and escaping democratic freedom fighters alike, both refusing to believe that once ashore the authorities would turn them away. But the Tye Corporation did, every one of them they managed to intercept, despite reports of firing squads being assembled to greet returning rebels. Hope Island issued no visas, forbade tourism and welcomed visitors by invitation only. Each week a patrol craft would return upwards of a hundred Cuban asylum-seekers, mostly young males, to their mother nation. Many would return there wrapped defiantly in the white-star-and-red-cross flags of the rebel guerrillas.
Jack had remonstrated with Tom over returning young men to almost certain death. He pointed out that the US automatically granted residency status to all Cuban refugees who managed to cross the Florida Straits and had suggested forwarding some of them to the US and to other nations prepared to offer asylum. TT had countered the suggestion with impeccable and forceful logic.
‘If none of them finds a route out from here, they’ll stop coming.’
Jack had merely nodded. But in the months that followed he had failed in this aspect of his duties on several occasions. He was well aware that some members of the Tye Corporation’s domestic and service staff were engaged in smuggling Cuban freedom fighters and their families aboard some of the many supply ships that visited the island. Having to prioritize, Jack chose to apply his forces to their core duties: protecting the corporation’s senior staff and the company’s assets on the island. Chasing refugees was not his idea of useful deployment.
Then the Cuban Foreign Minister had heightened tension with a public accusation that the Tye Corporation was failing to return all of the rebels who reached Hope Island’s shores. Tye had laughed at this suggestion, publicly suggesting that Cuba’s besieged government was paranoid. Relations with the neighbouring post-communist state had become severely frosty.
The procession turned a corner and Tye pointed to one of the low glass structures protruding from a lawn. He explained that, due to its location in the hurricane corridor, eighty per cent of the island’s commercial facilities were underground and that every pane of glass above ground was able to withstand winds of over 200 miles per hour.
The caravan moved out of the manicured and well-irrigated campus and began to climb the steep slope of a small peak on the western side of the island. Wide roads with surfaces of dark green asphalt cut their way through the island’s luxuriant undergrowth even though few of the island’s residents used surface transport.
They crested the hill and pulled into a viewing area at the edge of a clifftop. As was usual for first-time visitors, the delegation reacted with small exclamations of surprise.
Sitting at the centre of a large white crescent bay was an eighteenth-century Spanish-style colonial town. The pastel colours and soft stone of the buildings made it seem as if the settlement had been there for centuries. Only the dull glint of the Tye Corporation high-efficiency solar cladding on the rooftops betrayed its recent origin.
‘That’s Hope Town down below,’ explained Tye the tour guide as he pointed out the main features. ‘We built the harbour and the marina and we got Disney to design the buildings and the central part of town.’
He offered the president a pair of binoculars and watched as the Russian leader scanned the grid of the town centre, the Town Hall, the green city square and the Hope Island flag that hung listlessly from its white flagstaff. Stretching away from the town in both directions were ribbons of seafront developments that included bungalows, low condominiums, small private estates and beachfront bars and restaurants. In the distance there were signs of major construction where the settlement was being extended around the western headland.
Tye’s running commentary about the buildings and features below was a courtesy rather than a necessity. The binoculars the President was using were not only image-stabilized, 3D-enhanced and multi-wavelength, they were also network-enabled: the town’s public information system was providing small translucent Cyrillic captions that described every building and physical feature that came into view as he traversed the bay.
If he was impressed, he said nothing.
The president moved the focus of his binoculars up to the hills behind the town where gleaming white villas occupied the lower slopes of the old volcano. A low-rise hotel had been built at the foot of the mountain.
‘This is the shielded side of the island,’ Tye added. ‘The winds on this side never get too bad. That’s the Caribbean down there, not the Atlantic.’
The president scanned the view dutifully and nodded his thanks without comment.
‘We’ve taken great care not to disturb the settlement of frigate birds – Tachypetes aguuilus – on that ridge,’ announced Tye, suddenly the ornithologist, pointing to the cliffs on the other side of the bay as he tried another tack to engage the President. ‘And as you can see – perhaps taste – the air here is absolutely free of pollution.’
In the three cars behind, senior Tye executives were providing similar commentaries and viewing facilities for the rest of the delegation. The day was stiflingly hot and the overdressed Russians were sweating visibly underneath the white canvas canopies that shielded the open vehicles.
The procession restarted and did a U-turn in the empty road. They rolled eastwards down the hillside and were soon rewarded with a cool breeze from the Atlantic. They turned back towards the main campus and Tye explained that they would soon be entering the air-conditioned comfort of the underground complex. He informed his guest that all power on the island was derived either from the company’s solar-powered fuel cells or from heat-exchangers that extracted energy from the many underground hot springs. He joked that the old missile silos built by Russia had finally found a useful purpose. The old man nodded but did not respond further. The host smiled to himself; he knew he would get a reaction when they went below.
They drove around the base of the ancient volcano and Tye pointed out the cliff face of sheer plate glass that formed the frontage of his recently completed private mansion. It stood above five vast man-made terraces. He explained that he would have the honour of entertaining the leader and his party at his home later. The procession turned to head back to the main command complex.
Jack radioed his approval ahead and the cars passed through the open gates of the corporate command campus and drove straight down a ramp to the subterranean entrance. Tye leaped from the lead vehicle to demonstrate the security systems to his guests.
‘We use only biofeedback systems for security,’ he explained as the president and his party disembarked and walked round to the entrance. ‘Humans are unique. Our individual identifiers provide the one security key that can’t be duplicated or faked.’
Tye stood beside the main door and allowed the system to scan both his irises. ‘Open,’ he commanded and the metal doors hissed apart. He guided the president and his party onto a station platform surfaced with pale Chernites marble. A three-car train was waiting on the monorail.
Tye, the president, and the senior party climbed into the first car. Jack stood at the rear. The other Tye executives and Russian guests piled into the cars behind.
The shuttle pulled quickly out of the station and Thomas Tye was explaining the principles of maglev repulse-magnetism that propelled the train and allowed it to float silently and frictionless above its single rail. In response to the president’s question he admitted tha
t this was one of the few products on the island not made by a Tye subsidiary.
The old missile silos had served merely as a starting point for the immense underground complex that Tye and his team had instructed the architects to build. There had been a time, shortly after the Tye Corporation had first issued its own form of electronic corporate currency, when the piles of cash building up in the company’s coffers had proved unusable, inefficient and downright embarrassing. Despite benefiting from heroic returns on their Tye Corporation stock, institutional investors had complained that the corporation’s capital hadn’t been working hard enough.
But even such activities as massive share-buybacks, a move into global investment banking and large-scale aerospace investments had failed to stem the tide of cash generated by the super-efficiencies of network logistics, the elimination of the thirty-day economic cycle in favour of instantaneous real-time value transfers and the sheer economies of scale created by truly global operations. The more the Tye Corporation invested in real-time transaction and communication systems for itself and its clients, the greater the corporation’s returns became. It was as if traditional economic theory had been turned on its head: the almost total elimination of friction from business processes created a virtuous circle that released vast amounts of capital.
The huge construction project on Hope Island had provided a temporary solution to the problem and, these days, Tye and his executives had diversified the corporation’s activities and portfolio so much that there were endless uses for the accretive amount of capital that the various operations were creating from their billions of worldwide customers.
The maglev shuttle suddenly slowed and, from high above a huge atrium-like area, the party gazed down on six micro-satellites in various stages of completion within a glass-caged clean-room. The area was lit partly from the roof windows above and partly by suspended tungsten lighting.
‘They are for our new Deep-Space Location and Navigation System,’ said Tye. ‘Finishing the network ready for Phoebus expansion.’
The shuttle accelerated rapidly and moved on until the monorail branched ahead. Tye explained that further halls to the south were engaged on other aerospace projects while the centre rail headed towards his home on the west of the island. As usual, visitors were not invited to see the Research Park and the group visit to watch an orbit-shuttle launch was scheduled for the following day.
With a sharp increase in speed, the train branched north, over further brightly lit halls containing offices, TV studios and news rooms. It came to a rest above a vast glass-encased, air-conditioned room filled with seemingly endless rows of long wall racks containing blinking electronic equipment.
‘That’s our main server farm,’ Tye pointed out. ‘Those boxes down there are all connected to the networks and each is running a separate business.’
He pulled a DigiPad from his pocket and consulted it
‘There’s a dozen or so travel agents and brokers, two distance-learning universities that operate in over sixty languages, two hundred and ten auction houses, our global banks, eighty-one local-currency banks, sixteen bureaux de change, forty-seven automated stockbrokers and market makers, two hundred and four insurance brokers offering a range of financial services, thirty-nine global retailers selling high-value branded goods, two hundred and one casinos playing every type of game you can imagine and taking every kind of bet, over six thousand real-estate agencies – they have to remain as local brands – one hundred and twenty radio stations, over two thousand separate network game servers, our news servers and archives, eighteen hundred film and video back-catalogue servers – rentals and sales, music servers, book and magazine servers, aggregation and purchasing syndicates, telemedicine servers and, of course, our software servers for rentals and purchase. Then there’s the offshore finance and data havens, oh, and the cemeteries. We maintain virtual memorial and personal-history retrievatories for nearly eleven million families – people and pets.’
Tye inhaled theatrically as he ended his high-speed recitation of the long list. Jack had seen the performance previously: it was a party piece.
The president nodded as if he too had seen it all before
‘Of course, this entire complex is in the core of one of your old rocket silos,’ added Tye, breaking the silence that had followed his rehearsal of corporate achievement. ‘It’s hurricane-proof, earthquake-proof and, as you will recall, it was even designed to withstand a nuclear strike – as were the networks the servers feed.’
The president nodded again. Jack wondered what was going through his mind. The news broadcasts and magazines had praised him for patiently rebuilding the economy of his vast federation. ‘We have to travel three hundred years in ten,’ he had told his people. They were getting there even though vast, almost unrepayable debts still hung over the government’s head from endless rounds of Western refinancing. And, as Vlasik’s presence here proved, criminal interests remained at the heart of Russian government.
Oil was being extracted efficiently and getting to its markets. Coal was still being mined and burned despite the criticisms of Thomas Tye and other world leaders. Steel production was now of high quality and Russia’s aerospace industry had, once again, become world class. But although Thomas Tye had not said so, Jack knew that the GDP of the unmanned server farm below them eclipsed the entire economic output from one hundred and sixty million citizens of the combined Russian republics. But perhaps the president’s impassivity was merely a mask for common acrophobia.
Tye had made no mention of the other server farms. Some of the cash and data deposited and stored on Tye Corporation servers was so valuable and hypersensitive that no terrestrial offshore bank or data haven was considered adequately secure or discreet by certain ultra-paranoid customers: these particularly hot deposits were kept off-planet in a network of vast-capacity, high-bandwidth, multiply redundant data-server satellites hurtling around the planet 1,000 kilometres out in the deep-freeze of space. These interconnected storage facilities were designed to remain oblivious of any terrestrial nuclear events and they were also immune from the globe’s political and military reversions and incursions. They ignored natural terrestrial catastrophes such as earthquakes, rising ocean levels and volcanic eruptions and defied even extraterrestrial extinction events such as asteroid impact or celestial collisions.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of customers for such expensive services were dictators, despots, generals of various ‘people’s’ armies, Triad leaders, Mafia godfathers, drug shoguns, industrial-scale money launderers and the growing army of senior international executives of global corporations. Customers accessed these servers only by a fearsome combination of digital signatures, deeply encrypted and multiple-layered passwords and a range of very personal DNA verifications. Customers also held digital keys to self-destruct mechanisms on the satellites if they were ever forced to contemplate such extreme security measures. The Tye Private Bank asked no questions of depositors with sufficient funds to rent anonymous space in these networks of foil-wrapped, weightless deposit boxes.
The train restarted and entered a short tunnel. Then the party emerged above indoor tennis and squash courts, three gymnasiums and an Olympic-size swimming pool.
‘There’s also a fully equipped hospital in the complex,’ added Tye, unnecessarily. The president was due to become a patient the next day when the check-ups would be run before he became the latest customer of a Tye Life Sciences VIP service.
Tye maintained his running commentary until the train pulled into another station. He gestured for his guests to disembark, waiting politely as the president stepped slowly out. His heart was weak and only careful medical management allowed him to undertake limited public engagements. A pair of large black-glass doors offered the only exit from the station. In his temporary role as team leader Jack brought up the rear, although he was now confident that the situation was totally secure. Without realizing it, all members of the visiting party – including Anton Vlasi
k in the second car – had passed through four separate scans of varying wavelengths and, apart from the Russian army colonel who carried his weapons by agreement, Jack had heard his team confirm that the visitors carried neither armaments nor recording equipment.
‘This is the entry to our Network Control Center,’ Tye told his guests. ‘This is where we are able to follow progress and see the world’s networks as a whole.’
He stepped forward and allowed his irises to be scanned. Then, with a single movement, he provided a fingerprint from his right index finger to a scanner plate set into the wall. To complete the process he plucked a hair from his head with a theatrical flourish and placed it into a brightly lit scanning tube. A small door closed over the tube.
‘DNA verification, the ultimate security,’ beamed Tye, revelling in his sales pitch.
The President shrugged and tapped his own pate.
‘No hair. Not good for me,’ he said in careful English.
Tye and the party laughed dutifully. Jack thought it was rather good. He noticed Tom turn back to face the doorway, allowing a facial-pattern scan to be taken and the chemistry of his scent to be analysed. He was pleased to note that his boss had not explained that the individual biometric checks were all elements of a multi-part DNA signature package that, in total, was the most secure physical access-checking system ever devised.
A green light illuminated on the access panel and the doors hissed apart. Connie was waiting inside and she stepped forward to usher in the honoured guests.
To first-time visitors, the Tye Networks Command Center looked like a theatre-in-the-round that might have been created by set designers from Star Trek’s vintage years. The controllers sat on raised circular terraces facing inwards to a darkened central pit. But instead of banks of computer consoles, as in the old NASA command centres, the monitoring team sat in reclining armchairs with no obvious controls or display panels. The circular wall at the rear semi-circle of the room housed large flat display screens. The effect was dramatic and it was created for that purpose.
