by Hammond, Ray
‘Have you considered that some of your agents might have adopted altruistic behaviour?’ asked Liu.
Ah, there it is, thought Theresa; the real reason for his concern, and his visit.
‘Raymond, I have to let you into a little secret,’ she said. ‘Those agents aren’t as clever as they appear. It’s all a trick. I keep trying to teach my students that our artificial companions are still quite dumb and that it is we who anthropomorphize them. Their conversational ability is pure psittacism.’ She saw him frown and explained. ‘Purely a parroting of language.’
‘All these companions,’ she said, pointing to the sleeping Sandra, ‘only seem clever because they mimic us. They’re programmed to pick up our tone, our mood, as well as to identify – if not understand – our language. It’s merely a party trick and it is we who endow them with the qualities that make them seem so loveable. It’s one of the most powerful human instincts, and one of the first things I do with all my students is try to get them to understand that.’
Liu nodded. In his student days his computer-science professors had also staged demonstrations to show how stupid computers are and how gullible humans can be.
‘So there’s no chance that one of these agents, or a group of them, could have acted out of character?’ he persisted. ‘Or that any of them could have reproduced without you knowing about it?’
Theresa leaned forward and returned her own cup to the coffee table.
‘It’s impossible,’ she stated firmly. ‘Their behaviour is governed strictly by the rules we created. You can strike that idea.’
‘Well, I suppose that’s something,’ he sighed. ‘We have to eliminate every possibility.’
He paused and then decided to tell her the other reason he had requested this meeting.
‘There is something else,’ he added. ‘As I was unable to find any fault in the component parts of our networks, or the networks we are connected to, I went back to square one and ran a basic RQI procedure. I found–’
He hesitated. Theresa had held up a hand. ‘I don’t know what RQI means.’
‘I’m sorry Theresa. RQIs are an exercise we set our first-year network engineers. It’s a resistance, quantification and identification test. Students calculate the theoretical resistance found in an open, unused network. Then they measure the actual resistance of the network when it is in use and quantify data and the pathways to calculate how much resistance has been added by the activity in a network. They then reconcile the totals in order to check that there are no faults in any of the components or pathways. They are basic elimination procedures.’
Theresa nodded her understanding.
‘Anyway,’ continued Liu, ‘I carried out an RQI on the networks and I found . . .’
Theresa placed her hand to her throat in surprise. ‘On what networks?’ she asked, amazed that such a test could be undertaken.
Liu smiled. ‘On all the networks we operate and connect with.’
‘How much is that, exactly?’ she asked.
‘There are about nine billion miles of networks – if you treat satellite communication paths and broadband wireless the same as fibre-optic cable. Capacity for about four thousand exabytes – four billion, billion bytes.’
‘Some maths,’ breathed Theresa.
Liu acknowledged the compliment with an inclination of his head. ‘Of course, I automated the procedure as much as I could. Anyway, I found something very strange. There’s a flickering, transitory resistance in the networks that can’t be accounted for by data in transit, stored instruction sets, switching resistance or any of the other processes.’
Theresa frowned.
‘In fact there is over twenty per cent of network space that seems to be occupied by something I couldn’t identify – a sort of dark matter.’
‘Dark matter . . .?’
‘I don’t know what else to call it,’ admitted Liu. ‘Dark data, perhaps. The resistance tests show something’s there, but we can’t see it. We can’t actually tag it in any way. And . . . it seems to move.’
Theresa raised her eyebrows. Connections were being completed.
‘We’ll test one network one day and it will show a twenty, twenty-two per cent unexplained activity level – the next day there’s none. And there’s no record that those data, or that matter, or whatever it is, has passed through the routers to other networks.’
Theresa sat back in her armchair and thought hard, her right hand playing with her stamp box again as her mind worked.
‘Let me have a think about this,’ she asked finally. ‘I’ll get back to you.’
Liu nodded and stood. Theresa rose and took his hand.
‘Thank you for making the time to see me,’ said Liu, with another slight bow. He turned and walked out the way he had come, across the sunlit terrace.
Theresa sat down again, slowly. Her mind was racing. Who to call first? She would start with Robert, see where he was with the Descartes Experiment Absently, she picked Sandra up and sat her on her lap.
‘He seemed worried,’ observed the CatPanion. ‘Keep or discard?’
‘Oh, keep, I think,’ said the professor. Sandra purred contentedly as Theresa stroked her.
*
There was blood everywhere. The anterior carpal artery in Tommy’s left wrist had been severed and the gouts of blood had hosed the walls as if there had been an explosion in a cochineal factory.
Calypso had already seen the room through her viewpers but only her experience of the horrors of a late-night Chicago ER allowed her to overcome her panic immediately and start to assess the situation.
‘I had to restrain him, Doctor, in order to get a tourniquet and the compress on,’ Nurse Emily Pettigrew explained breathlessly as she cleared away the debris of her labours. ‘Then I gave him ten CCs of thiopentone. I was frightened that he would open the wound again.’
The boy was now unconscious on his bed. Nurse Pettigrew had displayed the value of her training as a British State Registered Nurse, applying a tight and efficient tourniquet on the pressure point of his elbow and binding a compress tightly to the main wound. Further up his forearm were the slashes he had made before the kitchen knife had found its target How had he known? Where had he seen or read about such self-harm?
He was very pale. Calypso checked his BP and pulse: 80/60/135. He needed blood, and she said as much to the nurse.
‘I have plenty matched and ready in the fridge,’ said Emily Pettigrew as she started to leave the room. She saw the doctor’s surprised reaction. ‘On Tom’s orders,’ she explained. ‘It’s always available. He allows me to draw fresh supplies from Tommy every three months.’
Calypso considered the situation as the nurse went to fetch the plasma.
It was clear that Emily Pettigrew had understood the sensitivity of the incident. Calypso had to admit the nurse had shown good sense in contacting Tom on board his plane – wherever that was – and specifically requesting permission for Calypso to attend, rather than rushing the boy to the clinic or asking one of the duty medics to visit the house. However loyal a Tye Corporation staff member might be, this gossip could have proved just too juicy to contain.
‘He just kept crying out for you,’ explained the nurse, ‘over and over again. I heard that on the monitors, but I didn’t realize he was hurting himself. Then I got the alarm.’
Calypso shook her head: she knew the syndrome. With every repetition of her name he would have been making another slice in his forearm. She had treated child patients who had undergone similar episodes of self-harm and had seen self-mutilation and pseudocide cases before. But she had never encountered the syndrome in a pre-teenager and had never known a victim to inflict self-harm during the waking hours of the morning. The events almost always occurred late at night or in the small hours and it was usually, but not exclusively, a female behaviour observed in patients with a history of depression.
Her VideoMate trilled. She found herself looking at Connie, then Tom, as she provide
d an update. She was unable to keep the stoniness out of her voice.
Tye nodded grimly as he digested the news. ‘Can you deal with it, Doctor? I don’t want to bring any others in.’
Calypso glanced at the boy and considered. She’d dealt with far worse as an intern, but they had been welfare patients.
She nodded. ‘He’ll be out for another hour or so, I should think. I’m just going to give him some blood to get his BP back up. We should be able to stabilize him for surgery. We just don’t know if there is any metacarpal damage.’
There was a short silence.
‘Doctor Browne. I realize how serious this is and I am grateful for your help.’
Calypso nodded again.
‘Would you do me – well, Tommy – a favour, please? Would you please accept another apology from his father and stay there with him. At least until I get back at the weekend.’
Calypso hesitated. She didn’t have a choice – her heart felt like breaking. For a moment she thought Tom would say something else, perhaps talk about a financial inducement. But he did not make that mistake. Instead he waited for her reply.
‘I’ll wait until you get back,’ she agreed. She would now do anything for Tommy.
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ sighed Tom. ‘We’ll keep this between ourselves.’
‘Of course.’ It could never be any other way.
‘The Furry will know what happened,’ said Tye. ‘Don’t let anybody remove Jed.’
Calypso returned to her patient. She would remove the compress and ligate the artery for safety before examining the surrounding tissue and bone. She would also ask Nurse Pettigrew to prepare an ice pack to keep his antibrachial as cold as possible. Then she would have him moved discreetly to the clinic where she could run X-rays and scans before moving him into an OR for stitching up. She debated whether she would have to call on one of the anaesthetists. Perhaps the thiopentone would last long enough. She would take half a beta blocker before she began the surgery. Although it would be a minor procedure, this was Tommy and she knew emotion might cause her fingers to tremble.
Chapter Sixteen
[Insert page 37 – Chapter One]
Thomas Richmond Tye was committed to the Sandler Sanitarium, Norwood, New Hampshire, USA on 6 August 1971. He was just over five years old. The committal order was signed by his father, Thomas Tye II, and the family’s long-time physician Dr Marcus Cordell. The cause for the committal was given as hysterical dissociation – a broad categorization that can cover a range of disorders including amnesia and somnambulism. A copy of the committal certificate was lodged with the court authorities in Norwood County, as was required by law. The date of the committal precedes the state’s Juvenile Justice and Detention Act that requires the active participation and approval of a local social services agency and the Department of Juveniles.
That is the end of all information available about Tye’s internment. We don’t know his condition on arrival or the treatment he received. We don’t know when he was released, nor do we know into whose care, although we do know that he was once again living back at the Tye mansion by the time he was thirteen when his paternal grandmother legally assumed responsibility for his upbringing. By this time family probate had been settled and Thomas Tye became heir to a thirty-two-million-dollar fortune that was held in trust by his grandmother until he was twenty-one. It appears Tye attended no school or college and there is no record that he passed any external examination or gained any form of academic qualification.
The reason we know nothing more of Tye’s internment is that the Sandler Sanitarium was purchased by the Tye family trust in 1987 and rebuilt as a cosmetic-surgery clinic. It was sold again in the same year. Since that time the directors of the clinic have consistently maintained that no patient records exist from the period prior to 1987. Reporters first started asking questions about Tye’s stay in the clinic over fifteen years ago when the Tye Corporation first became a quoted multi-billion-dollar company and its president became a nationally known figure in the United States. The clinic was unable to provide any help.
This time, at least, Haley knew the source of her information. She wondered why Jack had become sufficiently interested in Tye’s childhood problems to have done this research but, she had to admit, it did make good copy. She settled down to integrate the new paragraphs within her opening chapter and wondered if she should use some of the Sloan Press’s research budget to visit the sanitarium for herself. As she had learned during the research for her very first book, the best-selling film-star biography, second-hand sources are not to be relied upon and, despite the potency and verisimilitude of multi-angle 3D videoconferencing and the latest olfactory and gustation simulations, there still remained something special about visiting an individual or a place in person. She would only accept that the clinic had no records when she had established that fact beyond doubt.
Her first job, however, was to bring some sense of order to the vast streams of news and information reaching her in-box regarding Thomas Tye, the Tye Corporation and its many subsidiaries. Eighteen months before, when she had been planning her research pattern for this biography, she had programmed a group of software agents to hunt for all Tye Corporation and Tye-related information on her behalf. Now it seemed as though the amount of available information about her target had shot up to almost unmanageable proportions. Each morning she started reading the material gathered and, even after the system automatically discarded all encrypted files, she found herself still wading through the heap of information at the end of the day. It was overwhelming.
She therefore gathered her software agents and attached a de-duplication engine to each. At least she would then be spared reading some of the many similar stories being produced around the world. Then she began to draft an advertisement she would post in the many network discussion groups and communities that revolved around Thomas Tye and the Tye Corporation. This was where her new research budget would come in useful. She would offer a financial reward for any previously unpublished information about the tycoon or his company.
*
Ishkov Konstantine, Minister of the Interior for the Russian Federation, rose to his feet, his naturally florid, leonine face now suffused with blood. He leaned forward, his knuckles resting on the table top, and glowered across at Tye, Furtrado, Connie, the seven Tye Corporation attorneys and the numerous corporate analysts who were sitting opposite.
‘You arrive to rip the heart out of our Tartar homeland – to take the cradle of Russian civilization away from our people and yet you will forbid them to live there?’ he bellowed. ‘Nyet! Nyet! This will not go forward.’
Tye and his party did not need to concentrate on the translation feeds from their VideoMates to understand the minister’s position. But position it surely was – or rather leguleian posture, if Furtrado’s political analysts were to be believed. Konstantine was playing for the ever-present cameras, for the historical record and for the Russian people – creating an aura of personal importance for when the next elections came. If he failed to win re-election to central government, as the analysts predicted, he was likely to stand as a mayoral candidate in his home city of Novosibirsk, capital of the Krasnoyarsk Republic, and that was close enough to the southern border of Tye’s new province for him to claim an interest. It would therefore be important to win him over, especially as the Tye Corporation’s new agricultural enterprises were likely to need the processing facilities of Konstantine’s city. Tye suspected that the gift of one of the Baltic islands with its newly acquired microclimate would achieve that objective – when the time came.
They were seated in the great gilded Tsar’s Hall of the Terem Palace in the north-east corner of the Kremlin complex. Little government was conducted in the ancient walled citadel these days – most administration being centred around the State Union building across the Moskva River. But Thomas Tye and his colleagues from the mighty Tye Corporation were getting the sort of reception usually reserved for a visit
ing head of a superpower and his entourage – which, everyone conceded, was appropriate in the circumstances.
There had been a tour of honour through the streets of Moscow. The citizens knew Tye’s company was becoming Russia’s largest foreign investor – some muttered ‘saviour’ although that was unfair to President Orlov’s incredible achievements in economic reconstruction – and they had responded accordingly. The people were being informed that the huge new development was a partnership between the Russian Federal Government and the Tye Corporation, although the use of the word ‘partnership’ in this context added new dimensions to its generally accepted definition.
The Moscow Times Index had jumped thirty-two points in anticipation of the deal. Despite continuous television coverage and the press attention paid to Thomas Tye’s visit, so far there had been no reports of tribute self-immolations amongst fringe groups within the population.
Then there had been an interminable state dinner of disgusting individually baked coulibiacs that opened to reveal a pulverized slumgullion of fish shreds, cabbage and gravy. This had been followed by operose speeches that seemed to go on for ever. Tye had touched nothing of the food or the vodka and could not have cared less what his rapacious hosts thought of his restraint. He just wanted to get on with things and he didn’t need to drown in a vedro of high-octane alcohol to cement this deal. But such behaviour was exacerbated by the harsh Russian climate, he reminded himself, with a private smile.
