by Hammond, Ray
Suddenly the Holo-Theater pit was filled with light and Raymond Liu saw what looked like blue smoke. At the top right he saw a digital tripmeter headed Transactions. Then he saw that the central light was a vignette of blue, smoothly graduated but swirling. Loops and whorls appeared and from the bottom an amethystine glow began to spread gently upwards.
It was so peaceful. Raymond Liu found himself entranced, becalmed. He thought he could make out a shape in the colour. But nothing came of it. Then he thought he saw something else. There was no sound in the Control Center. They drank in the colours as they shifted through the visible spectrum and the counter spun in its recordings of the switch firings in the global networks.
Eventually Theresa stepped forward again. ‘Thank you, Robert,’ she said and her researcher killed the display. She turned to face the network chief.
‘We are fairly sure that’s an expression of an early dream, Raymond, but that’s as far as we’ve got: colours, a few shapes. And that’s taken eight years of preparation and work – but it emerged spontaneously. I’m afraid those quadrillions of shifting moneme-microsthenes probably account for the mysterious loading of your networks. Individually they’re too small to be counted, but collectively . . .’
Liu was still entranced by the display he had seen. Then, being an engineer, he made one more check. ‘I have to ask this, Professor,’ he said. ‘I don’t fully understand what you’ve been telling me but I think I get the drift. Is there any chance that whatever it is you’ve been trying to create could have . . . well . . . could have developed into something more? Something that could have consciously or unconsciously interfered with normal network operations?’
Theresa stared at him and pursed her lips. ‘It will be decades before we have a sufficient number of switch firings in the global networks to properly resemble the neural activity of the human brain,’ she said firmly. ‘At this stage I have to say not a chance, Doctor.’
*
‘Exclusive: We Reveal The Guest List At The Party of the Century,’ trailed the cover of the latest Hello magazine. Haley leaned forward and picked the top copy from the pile. She flipped to the pages indicated.
‘Thomas Tye Brings The World’s Leaders, Thinkers and Artists to Hope Island to Celebrate his Appeal for Ethiopia and the “Take Care of Our Planet Campaign”.’
Below were pictures of the American, EU and Russian Presidents, a galaxy of other world leaders, film and music stars (including Josh Chandler) and, of course, Thomas Tye himself. He was good-looking enough for the layout designer to have given him the largest picture on the right-hand page of the spread, facing the impossibly dreamy Josh Chandler.
Haley flipped over to the next page.
‘Mr Tye’s “One Weekend In The Future” Will Set The Global Environmental and Technological Agenda for the Next Decade,’ she read. Beneath this gushing prose were photos of the artists, writers, film stars and intellectual giants who were participating in the four-day event.
‘Are you buying it?’ demanded the Pakistani shopkeeper testily. Haley nodded and transferred payment from her LifeWatch.
*
Rolf Linquist Larsson sat opposite Michael Chevannes at the dark wooden conference table. They were alone. The UNISA officer noted that the tall Swede’s tanned face had become lined and his hair had retreated a significant distance from his forehead since the last known photograph of him had been taken eight years before. He was dressed in a crumpled khaki shirt and cut-off white jeans that were more than a little grubby, his bare feet semi-shod in open-toed sandals. In fact, he looked as if he had just got out of bed. But then, Chevannes realized he’d never knowingly met a multi-billionaire before.
Further up the approach road, Chevannes’s vehicle had been met by the same security guard he had encountered earlier. He had been led into this room in one of the white buildings and asked to wait there. But he’d been left with all his communications and recording equipment. He had promptly replaced his RayBan Electros with a pair of Armani clear-lens viewpers switched for Local recording. A water-cooler, a wall-mounted whiteboard covered with mathematical formulae and an inactive display screen were the only furnishings other than the table itself and half a dozen chairs. He was kept waiting for less than ten minutes.
From his shirt pocket Larsson took out the letter Chevannes had delivered and spread it flat on the desk. ‘May I see some ID?’
As Chevannes offered his ident, the astrophysicist glanced at it and nodded, making no attempt to verify or copy it. It was interesting that Larsson did not wear viewpers, LifeWatch nor VideoMate. The ultimate luxury of disconnection, thought Chevannes.
‘How did you find me?’
‘I don’t know,’ lied Chevannes. He had been ready for this most difficult of questions. ‘My office in New York provided some details and asked me to come and talk to you.’
‘This is private property and I don’t have to say anything. I have broken no law,’ responded Larsson in perfect English – honed from his years of exposure to the international academic community.
‘I have come here alone, Doctor. I did not ask the Peruvian government for help. In fact, they don’t even know I’m here.’
He waited as Larsson glanced down at the note again. It was a difficult letter to ignore, its message simple and to the point. On the embossed, headed notepaper of the United Nations, it was signed personally by the Secretary-General, and Ron Deakin had arranged for it to be couriered down to await Chevannes’s arrival at the UN compound inside the perimeter of Lima’s Jorge Chavez International Airport. Larsson bent his head to read it yet again, as if the contents might have changed in the last few minutes. Chevannes knew the details of the request from his own copy.
Dr Larsson,
On behalf of the 212 member countries of the United Nations, I write personally to ask for your assistance.
The United Nations International Security Agency has reason to believe that just over seven years ago you passed a piece of intellectual property to Thomas Richmond Tye III, president of the Tye Corporation. I am told that if used improperly this knowledge would have the potential to destabilize the world’s economy. If this were to occur, in the way that Dr Yoav Chelouche, president of the World Bank, believes possible, it could bring immense strife and suffering to millions of the world’s poorest nations and their peoples.
I understand that you may have given undertakings and entered into contracts that seemingly inhibit your ability to assist us. But this matter is of such importance to the global community that, if you will help our organization to protect the interests of its member states, I am empowered to extend UN diplomatic immunity to you on all issues related to this transaction. Such legal protection would render you immune to civil or criminal legal proceedings relating to the transfer of the above-mentioned intellectual capital within the jurisdictions of all member states.
We now need your help as a matter of urgency, and Intelligence Officer Chevannes of UNISA will provide further details.
I hope to be able to welcome you personally to the headquarters of the United Nations in New York in the very near future.
Yours sincerely
Alexander Theodore Dibelius
Secretary-General
Larsson finished his rereading of the letter, sat back and gazed at Chevannes. ‘Can you guess what we’re doing here?’ he asked with a sigh.
‘Astronomy?’ hazarded the intelligence officer.
Larsson stood up quickly and walked to the window. He looked up at the huge dish above them that blotted out the sky. ‘Not just that. We’re listening, Mr Chevannes. We’re listening to the universe.’
He turned back to face the UN emissary who remained seated at the table. ‘We have the only ears that can understand.’
Chevannes began to wonder if Larsson’s drug abuse had caused some permanent damage.
‘Can you force me to go with you?’ Larsson asked abruptly.
Chevannes shook his head. ‘Our charter gives us
special jurisdiction in all our member states – Peru included – but we have no powers of arrest. We would have to ask the local police to act for us, but we have no intention of doing that. As you point out, we know of no international law that you have broken. I have come here because I believe this issue is of crucial importance. We really do need your help, Doctor.’
‘You can’t imagine how important my work here is,’ Larsson said with a shake of his head, resuming his seat. ‘It dwarfs anything Thomas Tye could get up to.’
‘Tell me about it,’ suggested Chevannes.
Larsson studied his visitor with clear, Nordic-blue eyes, considering his options. Suddenly his face broke into a broad grin.
‘Then you’ll have to stay for dinner,’ he exclaimed. ‘That’ll give me time to think things over. We’ve got plenty of accommodation, and there’s dorado and empanada for the barbecue tonight!’
*
It started in Moscow. After consultation with the newly reinvigorated financial community, President Orlov declared Sunday, 30 August would be a day of federal celebration in support of Thomas Tye’s global appeal for aid for Ethiopia and the associated campaign to ‘Take Care of the Planet’. Mikhail Orlov also knew that on the same day he and Thomas Tye would be announcing the creation of the new state of Sybaria and the climatic re-engineering of huge tracts of Western Siberia. As Tye suggested, the excitement over the Ethiopian project would help to drown out any misguided ecological concerns about the latter project. President Orlov expected Russia’s massive national debt to be eliminated by then and that would also be announced proudly during the lavish festivities on Hope Island. The president’s office had ordered street and village parties to be organized throughout the entire Federation, providing a large special fund to subsidize the cost. Thus everybody would appear to have an immediate share in Russia’s windfall.
*
Michael Chevannes sat beside his host in silent wonder. They were alone on a specially designed wooden bench beside the observatory building. Its back was sharply raked to allow the occupants to sit comfortably while leaning their heads back against a flat tilted rail. It was nearly one a.m. and the heated seat was warm against their bodies.
Although Chevannes had travelled to many countries of the world, he could not recall seeing anything to approach the majesty of the giant moon above and its glittering stellate canopy. They were surrounded by stars, as if drawn up inside a cupola of the gods. Far below the land was lost in infinite blackness and the thin, clear air at the mountain peak allowed the stars to shine gold, without the twinkling interference and chromatic distortion of the lower atmosphere. The moon in perigee, vast, gibbous and immediately overhead, was bathed in light from the sun that revealed the mountain ranges and the bruised depressions of its continually battered impact craters in sparkling, sharp clarity. Beyond and all around, providing the celestial backdrop, was a wash of white stars so dense it seemed like phosphorescence on a summer night’s sea. Away to the west, perhaps twenty or thirty miles distant, dim laserbursts of a satellite communications network transferred data between the northern and southern hemispheres – and, appearing in all quadrants, catching his eye and animating the siderealism, were the white-red death streaks of meteors entering the atmosphere.
Neither he nor Larsson had spoken in the last fifteen minutes, and it was absolutely silent on the mountain top. They sat on their warm cosmic pulvinar, allowing their consciousnesses to cavort in the wash of infinity.
The natural ambient temperature at the mountain top was close to zero, but they were in their shirt-sleeves. When Chevannes had queried the viability of a barbecue in the chill of a mountain evening, his host had explained how solar-powered underground heating had been laid throughout the compound. At every few yards additional gas-flame outdoor heaters created microclimates like a warm summer evening, all run on natural methane gas. ‘Produced locally,’ added Larsson.
Earlier, Chevannes had learned that this was the highest observatory in the world, as the astronomer showed his guest the sixteen-metre adaptive optical telescope, then his real-time feed from the six orbiting Hubble telescopes and a NASA Mars-orbit telescope, his computer array for mining the vast warehouses of astronomical data collected, and the smaller direct-view optics housed in his observatory. Chavennes, the intelligence officer, had been hooked instantly. They had been touring the building for nearly three hours, only coming outside for occasional relief from visual overload: Some relief! thought Chevannes now as he sat in awe with his head tilted back.
‘It was Debussy,’ said Larsson eventually, ‘his Cello Concerto in D minor. Someone once asked him what it was about and he explained it was Pierrot angry at the moon.’
Chevannes had no idea what his host was talking about. He said nothing and silence returned.
‘What did they expect me to do, write a paper?’ asked Larsson, sitting forward a minute later, a hint of bitterness in his voice.
The visitor guessed this was a rhetorical question and left it to roll away across the mountains.
‘Perhaps I should have settled for a Nobel Prize. “Receiving an invitation to Stockholm”, they call it. Huh! That’s where I started from and for a mathematician it’s downhill all the way after thirty.’
Chevannes nodded emphatically, not knowing how else to respond.
‘The probability is very high that forms of aware intelligence exist around some of those stars out there – or around those we can’t even see,’ continued Larsson pointing at the sky, seemingly intent on an evening of non sequiturs. ‘What we can see in front of us with our own eyes is only part of our own galaxy – less than one per cent of the known star systems.’
Chevannes still said nothing. He knew he wasn’t expected to.
‘We are now seeing those stars as they were between two and four million years ago: that’s how long the light – the information about them – takes to reach us.’
Another minute’s silence.
‘No one has been able to prove whether they’re still even there or not – like Schrodinger’s hypothetical cat, kept inside a box. It might be alive, it might be dead. But until we look, mathematically speaking, it’s a mix of the two. So, until my work of seven years ago, we could only safely assume those stars were both there and not there.’
Chevannes turned his head to look at his host: he felt like Alice in Wonderland.
‘That’s the basis of all quantum theory, Mike,’ continued Larsson. ‘At the quantum level that’s just how the world’s physicists believe subatomic particles behave; where they are depends on who is looking at them – and when. But when no one is looking at them they are considered to be in both phases, in superpositions. But I know where they are, Mike. And I can prove their positions, I know how to allow for the effect of observation and measurement and non-observation!’
Chevannes nodded again. He would need to practise believing impossible things. Perhaps he should start before breakfast each day.
Larsson glanced at his guest and changed tack. ‘We can be sure that some of those stars are suns with orbiting planets, perhaps carrying elements that may have induced some form of what is called life – I prefer the term “intelligence”. We’re currently looking out for extra-solar planets possessing atmospheres, and simple maths shows us that any form of aware intelligence out there is certain to be much more advanced than ours. Half a million years – the time the human species has been around – is merely an eyeblink in cosmological terms, so anything less advanced than us wouldn’t even get classified as aware.’
Chevannes could feel a sense of inner dislocation occurring. He was inside himself and not; in virtual evanescence. Silence stole around them again.
‘I installed all that–’ Larsson continued at last, waving at the optical observatory building ‘–for my own pleasure, so I could personally see and feel closer to a part of our galaxy. But all the really important work these days is done by analysing the feeds we get from space telescopes orbiting the Eart
h, the moon and Mars, and the signals we receive with these radio dishes. You can’t see much from Earth these days, anyway. All serious astronomy is now virtual – non-real-time. It’s done by mining data.’
Chevannes’s own mind – his ‘virtuality’ – wallowed in the infinity of light and energy above him but then slowly and reluctantly returned to its earthly container. After a while, he glanced at Larsson and summoned the courage to ask a question that might make him seem a fool.
‘Do the radio telescopes also have to be this high up?’
The astrophysicist snorted and leaned forward, reaching into the side pocket of his shorts for a cigarette case.
‘These days, yes. Since communications systems went wireless the radio spectrum is as polluted as the visual – like the atmosphere. This altitude – and Peru’s isolation on this side of the Andes – takes care of most of that. I also wanted to be private. Nobody ever comes up here.’
The intelligence officer nodded. He tried to guess what it might have cost to transport the materials to the top of the mountain and build the twenty-three radio dishes and their tracks. Of course, if he had Larsson’s money he too might do something crazy, something wonderful, like this. This vantage point, this private montevideo, provided a view previously unknown to him, a perspective unimagined by his terrestrially shackled consciousness.
Larsson lit his joint with a match, blew out the flame and flicked it away into the darkness.
‘I don’t want to be away from here long.’
They were due to leave the next day.
The UN man stretched. ‘With any luck it will take just a few days – a week or so at most.’
Larsson drew on his joint. ‘You understand why this matters so much? Any advanced civilization will be wholly virtual. Even if they still retain some physical form, all their communications, transactions and interactions will be virtual. That might be digital, it might be some other form of representation, but I’m certain that however they communicate they will encrypt everything. They will be using prime-number or quantum encryption for everything. Why do you think the thousands of radio telescopes in the SETI programme have so far found nothing? All they would be hearing is white noise, even if they were receiving full-on extraterrestrial communications every day.’
