Emergence

by Hammond, Ray

  ‘That’s an insult, Mr Tye,’ snapped the Attorney-General. ‘This administration is responsible to the people of America, the people who made your corporation what it is in the first place, and this government will not be brushed aside by a mere businessman!’

  Furtrado had then called on his courtroom training to remain impassive. He knew what would follow.

  ‘Listen, Treno,’ shouted Tye, jumping to his feet. ‘I’ve got William Wilkinson’s FUCKING SPARE HEART beating in a box on Hope Island, along with duplicate organs for half his administration, most of Congress and nearly all the Senate. Don’t you tell me what to do. You’re just trying to get us back under your control so you can stifle innovation and stop us making really great products and services the world really wants. I’ve already seen what you guys can do to a successful corporation – which is why I took my company out of the USA in the first place.’

  And that had been that.

  ‘You’re right, Tom,’ agreed Furtrado as he fastened his seat belt. ‘To heck with Jane Treno.’

  The jet began its take-off for Hope Island.

  *

  Easy Zee Zee took a last toke on his joint of Acapulco Gold, stared at the holo control panel hanging in mid-air in front of his chair and wondered if there was anything else that could be squeezed from the forthcoming market in solar energy.

  Not at present, he decided as he scratched his sparse goatee beard. Cool: this would be the ultimate utility stock! He would reinvest some of the millions he had already made on the LifeLines flotation. He would also short the main oil, gas and power company equities well before his new service was announced. That should prove interesting.

  ‘Finish,’ he told the system, still holding his breath. He finally emptied his lungs of what he regarded as the best shit in the world, leaned back and yawned extravagantly. He was alone in the Solaris Control Center, as the Network Center had now been rededicated, and it was very late. This night, there would be little chance of anybody but a security guard interrupting or complaining about his smoke. In two weeks the Center would be busy 7 x 24 x 365.2421 (accurate time measurement being vital) when the Solaris network went live and began to redistribute its heavenly largesse: the centre had already set all atomic clocks and microprocessors to GMT and, from the launch onwards, its workers would exist within a separate time zone on Hope Island. From here the controllers would be able to direct each satellite, focus its solar reflectors and keep a manual watch from space as the world’s climate reacted and the weather patterns changed. All of these data would be fed in real-time to the Halcyon GCMS – the global climate-modelling system – and all marketing would be under the management of Zee Zee’s automated systems.

  Throughout the Tye Corporation’s terrestrial networks, engineers were completing a two-year project to retrofit air pressure, temperature, humidity, visibility and precipitation sensors to every cellular network mast, every network hub and every Tye Corporation and Tye-related property in almost all of the countries of the world. In all prime-market territories, Tye Meteorology Inc. had also completed funding agreements with universities to launch permanent middle- and upper-atmosphere drone and balloon research programmes and live feeds from these weather probes would also be patched to the Center where they would be fed into Halcyon. Although Phase 1 of the Phoebus Project would only provide Solaris coverage to fifteen per cent of the Earth’s surface, by the final phase – scheduled to be complete in eight years – almost every inch of the planet’s surface would – or could – be affected.

  The servers had been configured, the real-time connections with the networks had been set up – all with massive bandwidth – and the interlinks with the Argus, Prospect and Hughie satellite networks were in place. These would supplement the information from the Tye Corporation’s terrestrial and atmospheric meteorological sensors and would, respectively, provide both controllers and customers with real-time visual, infra-red and microwave meteorological information about the globe’s weather patterns. Used in conjunction with the Halcyon system, highly accurate projections and predictions could be made.

  Customers would be provided with access to the Halcyon system so that they could model their projected use of Solaris output and this would help them make their choices on timing, select the appropriate power rating, choose the most appropriate tariff or help them decide which auction model most closely met their needs. In the early years, both controllers and customers would be learning the most effective configurations for the Solaris stations in differing weather conditions and Zee Zee had factored free consultancy and Halcyon access into all sales models for the whole of Phase 1.

  Necessarily, the Solaris network had certain times blocked out for the long-term climatic-engineering project in Sybaria and for the microclimate treatments specified for Moscow, some islands in the Baltic Sea, a few thousand square miles in northern Canada and some carefully chosen sites in Alaska. But these absorbed only 36.71 per cent of the output from the fourteen Solaris stations already in position. Inside six months there would be a further twenty in orbit and then the launch schedule was due really to accelerate.

  Zee Zee had worked night and day for nearly three months. Tom had been so pleased with the success of the LifeLines auction models that he had instantly charged him with this most important of all tasks – constructing the systems to maximize the income from the Phoebus Project. When Zee Zee had first heard the details of the service he had been amazed. He could remember that first sleepless night after the briefing – selling sunshine, heat, rain and energy to the world? He had thought LifeLines was the ultimate business, but he now realized that he had seriously underestimated his boss’s ambitions: Tye made all previous tycoons seem lilliputian.

  From 30 August, the world’s nations and corporations could enter what would become a contest to decide who would gain rights to this new energy source and its valuable by-products – water, heat, light and agricultural re-engineering. Customers could choose from a wide variety of supplier-customer relationships, all designed by Zee Zee on the advice of the Tye Corporation’s revenue-optimization economists.

  The system had been tested and tested again. The mismatched liver from the LifeLines servers was coming to be regarded as a one-off, an aberration unlikely to recur. Raymond Liu had found no faults in the system and his forensic computing team had been unable to find a glitch anywhere along the visible audit trail: laser pathways between satellites were, of course, temporary and unauditable. Most tellingly, Marsello Furtrado had ordered Zee Zee and his team to make follow-up enquiries on one hundred other LifeLines customers – selected at random from thousands of recipients. Every one of the customers contacted had pronounced themselves delighted with their transplanted organs and offered LifeLines unequivocal endorsement.

  Zee Zee knew that in the future he would have many additional products to offer, for which he would have to build fresh features into the auction engines. He was particularly excited about the steering services for hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes and cyclones that they planned to offer. The Phoebus engineers and the Halcyon meteorologists were certain that when there was sufficient Solaris output available they would be able to divert even the largest storm. Zee Zee was uncertain whether to offer such a service to the insurers of properties and businesses in potential threat paths or whether to offer it first to state authorities and governments.

  Then a thought struck him. He had read somewhere that common germs and viruses are temperature sensitive, so for a region suffering a flu epidemic or some other infectious disease, a few days of increased sunshine and raised atmospheric temperature might well kill off temperature-sensitive germs. The economic advantages would prove significant – it could also save a fortune for the services operated by Tye Healthcare. Cool, something else for the future.

  Zee Zee stood up and emptied the contents of his ashtray into a paper napkin, screwing it into a ball and carefully putting it into the pocket of his jacket. He then put the ashtray into his
other pocket.

  All that was left now was a final demo for Thomas Tye and then it would be time for the grand launch. Capitalism felt great when it could be coupled with worthy causes.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ‘Perplex – ment!’ exclaimed Tommy proudly as he placed the M, E, N and T tiles on the board. ‘And that’s a triple word score!’

  ‘That’s not a word,’ snorted Calypso indignantly, ‘is it, Jed?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is,’ said the caterpillar. ‘It’s rare but not obsolete. It means “perplexed condition, perplexity”, actually.’

  ‘There,’ crowed Tommy with an emphatic nod. ‘That’s eighty-one!’

  ‘I’ll never catch up now,’ groaned Calypso as she wrote down his score. He had four hundred and twelve to her three hundred and two, and there were only a few tiles left.

  The three of them were playing Scrabble, not the popular on-screen version but a battered board game with plastic tiles that Calypso had kept from her childhood. They had first played it during the visit to see her mother and Tommy had since become an addict. Jed had become both referee and adjudicator, having instant access to both the Oxford English Dictionary and to Webster’s.

  Calypso realized her life had undergone momentous change. Tom’s shock and horror at his son’s wild bid for attention seemed to have been the key to unlocking his previous intransigence – at least concerning domestic arrangements. At Tom’s request, Calypso stayed with Tommy during all his free time and she was even allowed to readjust the boy’s timetable to create more opportunities for him to see his father. She had also been given network access to Tom’s personal scheduler so that she could maximize the opportunities for the two of them to be together. That had caused Connie to raise a manicured eyebrow.

  Although Tommy seemed to sleep little, he was always fresh-eyed and cheerful. The cutting incident now seemed wholly out of character and Calypso found herself wondering if the boy had staged it deliberately rather than responding to a fit of hysteria. She knew of no other cases in which a seven-year-old would display such cold self-possession. If he had harmed himself merely to get his own way, the incident would be classed as deliberate parapraxia – one for the clinical histories. But Tommy was unique in several ways, as Calypso had reminded herself.

  She had started a journal of life inside the Tye household – part personal account, part clinical record. Even though she loved Tommy too much even to contemplate the idea of ever publishing it, she was aware that fate had placed her in a uniquely privileged position. She alone was able to observe how an enhanced, cloned human being was developing, and could observe the degree to which the personalization of the brain altered it from its raw genetic blueprint. Here too she had a living experiment in which she could measure the influence of nurture over nature. But, leaving aside the medical considerations, she was also privileged to observe the daily life of the richest family ever seen on the planet.

  Like most medical practitioners, Calypso was more interested in the potential and practical benefits that science had to offer her profession than about abstract ethical concerns. She saw no sanctity in the human condition or form per se and suffered from no religious dogma; she saw only widespread and immense suffering and an opportunity for her to help. Her generation might be the first in which doctors began really to understand the mechanisms of the body. Since the map of the human genome had been published at the beginning of the century – while she was undergoing her medical training – biochemists and physicians had collaborated to unravel the mysteries of the fragile human container and eradicate most of the diseases to which it was prone.

  Cancer was now almost defeated, cardiovascular disease had been significantly reduced in the developed world, and even neurological ailments such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and motor-neurone disease had yielded to gene therapy that could replace damaged areas with healthy tissue. As a result, average life expectancy in richer nations had now shot up to ninety-six years for women and eighty-eight for men, with many living to become healthy and active centenarians. The actuaries now predicted further extension to healthy lifespans in the coming years, and Calypso accepted that if she avoided accident she herself could almost certainly live to be over 120 years old.

  Calypso’s ethical stance was clear: she approved of any intervention to prevent or alleviate suffering, so she had no strong feelings about genetic manipulation, bio-medicine or organ cloning providing they caused no harm to the patient – alive or yet to be born. She also supported the right to early-term abortion because she didn’t confuse physical form with human personality, and she accepted that twenty-first-century medicine was dealing with a species that was taking control of its own evolution and rapidly re-engineering both its physiology and its environment.

  But that left the mind – which was why Calypso had opted to study the final human attribute that was not yet understood. Despite incredible advances in brain measurement and analysis of function, no cognitive-neuroscientist had yet been able to prove how consciousness emerges and is then sustained. Most theoretical wisdom now suggested that consciousness first arose spontaneously once the processing environment – the human brain – became sufficiently complex. A popular analogy was a swarm of bees or termites where individual members operated on simple rules while together creating highly complex behaviour. But no one could prove this was how human consciousness emerged and no one could justifiably claim that self-awareness arose automatically in a community engaged in complex processing transactions.

  As a first-year student of paediatric psychology Calypso photocopied a page from one of the then-foremost books on how the mind works and stuck it on her noticeboard. It contained a quotation from a short story by the science fiction writer Terry Bisson, narrating a conversation between two aliens:

  ‘They’re made out of meat.’

  ‘Meat . . .?’

  ‘There’s no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our reccon vessels, probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.’

  ‘That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?’

  ‘They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.’

  ‘So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.’

  ‘They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.’

  ‘I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they’re made out of meat.’

  ‘Maybe they’re like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.’

  ‘Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their lifespans, which didn’t take long. Do you have any idea of the lifespan of meat?’

  ‘Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the Weddilie. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.’

  ‘Nope, we thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilie. But I told you, we probed them. They’re meat all the way through.’

  ‘No brain?’

  ‘Oh, there is a brain, all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat!’

  ‘So . . . what does the thinking?’

  ‘You’re not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat.’

  ‘Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!’

  ‘Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?’

  Calypso pulled her thoughts back to the game and drew her favourite piece of thinking meat towards her. She kissed Tommy on his warm cheek.

  ‘Cally . . .!’ he complained, not really minding.

  On asking Jack why he had thought to te
ll her about Tommy’s origins, he had said simply, ‘In case anything ever happens to Tom. The boy would need you.’

  Once she had been made aware of Tommy’s genesis she found it had made her even more determined to protect him. The first eight years of a child’s life is the crucial period in which he or she learns the gift of attachment – the ability to place loving trust in relationships – and Calypso was desperate to pump her love and constancy into him before a self-protection mechanism cut in fully, inhibiting the development of his emotional neural-response pathways to shield him from the pain of further grievous separations. She judged that her seven-month presence here was already having a beneficial effect. He had even kissed her on the cheek – twice – as she had settled him down to rest at night.

  Which was more than Jack Hendriksen had done recently, thought Calypso as she pondered the letter combinations in front of her. He had avoided her presence since he returned from visiting his sick mother and had avoided her gaze on the three occasions they had met in public. Being Calypso, she had not left it there.

  ‘Avoiding me, Jack?’ she challenged him via her VideoMate three days later. She noticed the look of guilt on his face.

  ‘I’ve– It’s been frantic with the weekend event coming up.’

  She pursed her lips.

  ‘It’s also, well, I’ve met someone, Calypso,’ he admitted.

  ‘What, at your mother’s sickbed?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘No. Someone I’ve known for a while now. I will tell you about it when I see you. I’m sorry.’

  And that had been it. Calypso had been upset, but not greatly. She had allowed herself to develop some feelings for the strange, watchful man but she had also noted Jack’s careful avoidance of the big words, his scrupulous concern not to make more of their time together than mutual companionship and physical enjoyment. Within a couple of days Calypso began to understand that he had not been dishonest with her and although she felt an inevitable sense of rejection, her training helped her identify the roots of those feelings and estimate that they would take only a few weeks to repair.