Emergence

by Hammond, Ray

  ‘Moo,’ mooed Calypso as she laid three of her tiles under the last three letters of the word Tommy had just composed. ‘M,O,O – Moo – and Em – that’s something used in printing – and No and To.’

  ‘Quite correct,’ approved Jed. ‘And very clever, Doctor. Four words from three tiles.’

  ‘But that’s still only thirteen,’ laughed Tommy who could add faster than she could read out the numbers.

  ‘Look,’ he exclaimed, laying four tiles out quickly to add a paragoge. ‘R,Q,U,E. Torque! And it’s another triple word score. There, that’s forty-five!’

  ‘Hello, you three.’

  They turned their heads. Thomas Tye was standing in the doorway wearing a huge grin.

  ‘My God!’ exclaimed Calypso, clapping her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Daddy!’ shouted Tommy, adopting one of Jed’s Englishisms. ‘What have you done?’

  Tom stepped into the room and turned around. ‘What do you think?’

  The shock was considerable. Calypso had known Thomas Tye’s face for twenty years before she had met him. His long locks had been his symbol, his badge, his emblem of power and freedom.

  ‘You’ve cut all your hair off,’ she breathed, her hands still to her face.

  ‘Well, not all of it,’ smiled Tom. ‘I quite like it this way.’

  So do I, thought Calypso. A man had stepped out of a caricature.

  Tommy jumped up on a chair and stretched out one hand. Tom bent his head so the boy could rub his hand through the stubble. Tom laughed and then grabbed his son and swung him off the stool and round in circles that flung Tommy’s legs outwards. The child squealed with pleasure as Tom increased the speed, until finally he slowed and returned the boy to his feet.

  Tom gripped the back of the chair to steady himself while, still dizzy, Tommy stumbled across the room and fell onto the soft bed with a laugh.

  ‘It’s very . . . manly,’ commented Jed.

  ‘Calypso?’

  ‘Yes, very manly,’ she agreed. ‘But why?’

  ‘I’ll read you a story, Tommy,’ said Tom. ‘It must be time for your dreams.’

  Calypso took her cue and rose. ‘Tommy’s won anyway,’ she acknowledged, pushing her feet back into her slippers.

  ‘And, Calypso, I’ll explain over supper tomorrow,’ suggested Tom. ‘If you would be gracious enough to join me?’

  She looked into his violet eyes and raised one eyebrow. His eyes held laughter – almost the same mischievousness she sometimes saw in Tommy’s.

  ‘I’d be delighted,’ she said simply.

  *

  ‘Oy, ologists!’ growled Chelouche. Amethier and Deakin nodded, feeling the same way.

  The presentation had now lasted four hours and had been full of ifs and buts, maybes and perhapses. The fact was that none of the six weather scientists invited to comment on how the Phoebus Project might affect the world’s climate seemed to have a clue.

  ‘We would need to build a huge model of the world’s atmosphere and weather systems and then plug all the data from the Solaris systems into it to get any idea of how the whole thing will interact,’ Professor Madison had explained. ‘My guess is that the Tye Corporation meteorologists must have already built and tested such a model. They’ve got thousands of joint agreements for information-gathering with universities and weather institutes all over the world. They’ve even got an army of amateurs feeding in pictures and measurements over the networks – just in the hope of getting personally mentioned on Tye’s Halcyon Weather Channel!’

  The UNISA executive committee had heard that how, if the Earth was a peach, the atmosphere would be no thicker than the fuzz on its skin. They had learned that the atmosphere was just 600 kilometres thick, composed of layers, with the lowest ten-kilometre-thick stratum responsible for creating most of the ground-level weather. They’d heard about convective cells and vortices and of the stratified layers of lighter gases that sit on the top of the atmosphere. It had been explained that the atmosphere was also a giant thermal engine converting the sun’s radiant energy into heat and that variance in this conversion at different points in the atmosphere causes it to shift, creating winds and weather troughs and highs.

  Then they had been shown tephigrams, adaibatic curves, ageostrophic and geostrophic wind patterns (with and without the Coriolis effect), Brücker cycles, climographs, hyetographs, progressions of isallobars, isoteres and isochrons as well as langleygraphs, mesoscales and nephanalyses. Next they had suffered force-fed explanations of frontogenesis, isopycnic ultracentrifugal separative techniques, katabatics and orometrics.

  Chelouche wondered if Professor Madison was extracting sweet revenge for his earlier rudeness. Eventually he had lost patience and risen to his feet. He walked over to the large holo-projection of the Earth and jabbed a stubby digit towards East Africa.

  ‘Look, when it comes to science, I’m a shmendrik, OK? I can’t understand the complicated stuff. It’s dry here and I want to make it rain. So if I’ve got all these sunlight reflectors behind the Earth, what do I have to do to make that happen?’

  ‘Well, you might concentrate your heat on Lake Victoria, to the south-west,’ suggested a German limnologist. ‘That’s only eight hundred miles away. If you could raise the surface temperature there a few degrees you would definitely get evapotranspiration starting to occur.’

  ‘That would only work if you happened to have a handy twenty-knot wind blowing in the opposite direction to the prevailing force of the Earth’s rotation,’ objected a young Australian nephologist. ‘But I reckon you’ve got to go with the Earth’s rotation, mate. We’re nearly on the equator and there the speed of the land surface overrules everything – even wind direction. I reckon he’s got to heat up a patch of the Indian Ocean or the Arabian Sea and let rotation do the rest.’

  ‘No, no,’ cut in a French mesopherologist. ‘He can tackle the noctilucent clouds more easily.’

  ‘Enough,’ said Chelouche. ‘Enough already.’

  He had thanked them and sent them back to their labours. ‘Well?’ he turned to his Executive.

  ‘It’s clearly an awesome technology,’ observed Amethier quietly. ‘I’d bet he can do what he says he can do.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet against him, either,’ agreed Deakin.

  ‘Well, we are the United Nations, gentlemen,’ insisted Chelouche. ‘We can’t allow one corporation to control the entire world’s weather, even if it claims it is doing so for the good of the planet! We discovered years ago that weather and climate are the two most important indicators of any region’s economic potential. Control of such forces must never be in private hands.’

  *

  ‘Raymond.’

  ‘Chomoi.’

  They had been conversing so much recently that these technical supremos of rival networks had almost become friends.

  ‘It’s not looking good,’ sighed Ltupicho. ‘We’re still experiencing unaccountable network failures. We’re not yet losing data but we still can’t find the cause.’

  Raymond Liu nodded. His Russian counterpart looked as tired as he did. ‘We’re coming to the opinion that it could be some form of datum virus. I can’t see what else it could be. Perhaps something that’s mutated on its own.’

  Ltupicho snorted. ‘And I thought we Russians were the ones who liked fairy tales.’

  Liu managed a wan smile.

  ‘I hear you are inheriting some of my networks?’ smirked the Russian.

  Liu was startled. He’d only heard this himself the week before and the news was regarded as hyper-sensitive.

  ‘The ones in Eastern Siberia – the ones it costs us most to maintain.’ The Russian engineer laughed. ‘But I also hear that conditions will be different when you take over.’

  Raymond Liu shook his head. ‘No comment on that, Chomoi.’

  *

  In the back of the UN limousine Ron Deakin slumped and closed his eyes. It was Friday evening and, for the first time in weeks, he might be home in ti
me to share a meal with Ruby. The limousine was a perk that Deakin appreciated: a car with a diplomatic status that allowed it to come in and out of Manhattan and to negotiate almost any street at will. Another perk was the small cocktail cabinet. The UNISA officer poured himself a large malt whisky. It was definitely time for a drink.

  On this evening the East River bridges were full with other vehicles that enjoyed similar privileges – government cars, city administration vehicles, police and emergency services and the hundreds of shuttle buses that ferried people back and forth to the security-guarded Park-and-Ride car pounds in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx. He was heading for Newport, the small waterside community on Long Island where he and his wife had lived for over twenty years. They were both well known in that marina town, but it was Ruby who had really put down their roots. She had long ago accepted childlessness as their lot and devoted her free time to half a dozen voluntary causes, quickly developing a rich social life. Other Newporters knew Ron as a genial bureaucrat who put in long hours at the UN headquarters in Manhattan, but none of their neighbours suspected that years before the pair had added UN diplomatic status to their passports.

  He lifted his head off the back seat and glanced down at the e-paper he had brought from his office. Its news was a week old so he touched an icon on his VideoMate and refreshed the digital ‘paper’ with that evening’s news.

  The lead column of the Post covered William Wilkinson’s opening speech at the start of his re-election campaign. Deakin looked further and grimaced. The other main item concerned a major network failure.

  Global Bank Settlement Network Crashes. $6 Trillion Lost in I Hour

  At the bottom of the page there was a story about Tye’s coming event on Hope Island.

  Tye Weekend Seminar Threatened by Tropical Storm

  He enlarged the print of the body copy and read that a tropical storm now brewing off the coast of East Africa might have the potential to cross the mid-Atlantic, gathering strength before proceeding through the West Indies to cause the usual seasonal panics in southern Florida.

  Well, he was away from the office now and he wouldn’t waste a one-time code on a fax to Chevannes or the meteorologists. He knew they would already be on to it. Then a quaint thought struck him. He considered the wealth and power that would be heading for that part of the Bermuda Triangle just when this storm was supposed to arrive. Not good timing, thought Ron.

  He called ahead to the house and saw that Ruby was cooking. ‘I took you at your word,’ she said. ‘We’re having Cajun chicken with jacket potatoes.’

  He checked she had received his ETA and relaxed into the cushions with his malt whisky.

  *

  Calypso had no idea what had prompted Thomas Tye’s invitation to dinner. She had been surprised and delighted when the suggestion had first been made. Then she began to worry whether she was in for another tussle over Tommy. Perhaps Tom was once again feeling uneasy and wanted to revert to the old routine. She wasn’t going to have any of that.

  Her greatest problem had been what to wear. She thought about a full-length dress but, when she slipped it on, she thought the effect looked overdone. By nature the doctor was both practical and casual. Her favourite combination on the island was a pair of shorts and a shirt, but she knew that would not do for this occasion.

  The majority of her clothes were still here at the cottage. After discarding the full-length gown, she tried on a black silk trouser suit and turned in front of the mirror. Too severe for a summer’s evening with just the two of them.

  Next she tried on a pale blue knee-length dress with a tight skirt. Too much like a wedding guest, she thought. Then she tried on a sheer ivory dress with a low neckline, tight low-waisted bodice and a calf-length skirt flounced at the bottom to lift into undulations as she twirled her hips. Rumba! thought Calypso – a perfect partnership.

  *

  The situation was definitely easing. Raymond Liu had driven his worldwide teams to breaking point and two of his most senior territory-maintenance managers had already walked out. Every inch of cable, every transmission node, every laser source, every encryption engine, every hub, router, firewall, amplifier and dish had been checked, replaced or rotated. In all, 27,566 maintenance staff had been involved in sixty-nine territories. The four manned space stations dedicated to orbital network maintenance had snagged, retrieved and overhauled 2,800 of the 22,902 satellites that comprised the various Tye Corporation networks. Only another 20,102 to go!

  But each time a delicate satellite was carefully tethered to a maintenance station the results were the same: no unusual system-faults could be found. Faults in all aspects of the networks occurred frequently and routinely, but the data flows were designed to work around such outages, automatically self-healing and pursuing their destinations by other routes.

  Raymond Liu now had a small army of mathematicians working on the problem: they were trying to find a pattern amongst the failures. Not a physical pattern, such as the repeated failure of one particular type of component, but a mathematical pattern that might identify whether the massive rise in system faults was the result of some intelligent action.

  He had thought about Professor Keane’s gedankenexperiment very carefully. Although she was clearly crazy, he was forced to agree that her random usage of processing polarities in the networks was unlikely to cause any problems. Each switch would simply regard the requests from her software as another binary call and respond accordingly.

  Raymond Liu was developing a theory of his own that was much more unsettling.

  *

  ‘I say, Doctor, you do look good.’ If a toy caterpillar could have whistled, Jed would have done so. Instead he winked, which lent his face a peculiar leer.

  Tommy looked up from his book as Calypso hovered in the doorway; she had popped in to see them on the way to dinner.

  Tommy’s gaze took her in from head to foot, but he didn’t bounce up and cuddle her as he had begun to do. She could sense he was unhappy, so she stepped into the room and kneeled beside his chair.

  ‘I’m having dinner with your father tonight,’ she said, looking into his troubled violet eyes.

  ‘You’ll just argue again,’ muttered Tommy, looking down into his book. ‘Then you’ll go away and I’ll never see you again.’

  ‘We won’t argue, I promise.’ Calypso reached out and touched his hair.

  Suddenly he turned in his chair and flung his arms around her neck, burying his face in her shoulder. ‘You’ll go, you’ll go, my father will send you away and I’ll never see you again,’ he cried.

  She stroked the back of his neck and impulsively kissed the top of his head, letting him sob for a few moments, his tears wetting her dress. But that didn’t matter; she knew exactly why Tommy was so scared.

  When the sobbing subsided she lifted his head from her shoulder and held his face in both hands.

  ‘Look at me, Tommy,’ she said. ‘I love you and I’m not going anywhere. Your father understands we’re happy together, OK?’

  Tommy nodded, his eyes still cast down. She kneeled beside him for a few more moments, then realized there was nothing more to be done.

  ‘I’ll come and see you later, Tommy.’ She rose.

  He just nodded.

  ‘See you later, Miss World,’ said Jed.

  *

  ‘We’ve lost the whole of the Indian subcontinent,’ reported the distraught engineer.

  Raymond Liu nodded silently, watching the vast black hole over the Indian ocean on his own monitors.

  ‘It’s not just us. Everybody else is reporting data corruption or discontinuity in that region.’

  ‘How long?’ asked Liu. He knew he was going to have to report this reversal to Tom soon, before he heard it from other sources.

  ‘We’re tasking in the weather sats and the surveillance sats – as you suggested. We should get something moving later this morning.’

  Liu looked at the brilliance of the loading in the surroundin
g networks – the Sino-Pacific loops were close to peak capacity as they provided compensatory routes around the affected region.

  ‘Keep me informed,’ ordered Liu, with a sigh.

  *

  Calypso was a bit later than she would have liked, having gone back to her room next door to repair the damage Tommy’s tears had done to the shoulder of her dress. The stains had dried quickly under the blast of her hairdryer and she had only had to tidy her hair again before going down. When she emerged from the elevator she found Luc Bestion, Tye’s butler, waiting with a smile.

  ‘Tom’s out on the front lawn.’ He led the way.

  Out on the ground-level terrace she declined the offer of a ride in a Volante and trod carefully along the gravel path in her high heels. It was only 8.20 p.m. – too early for any dew to have fallen.

  Tye had ordered the table to be set up under one of the great African cedar trees on the top terrace in front of the big house. The evening was perfect: mild, warm and – a speciality of Hope Island – free of irritating bugs.

  He was already sitting at the table and Calypso was pleased she had dressed up rather than down. He was wearing a charcoal-grey silk suit with a mandarin-collar jacket. Though he wore a customary white T-shirt beneath, the suit gave him too the air of dressing for the occasion.

  He was in a viewper conversation as she approached but he soon wrapped up the meeting and stood up as she arrived at the table.

  ‘Calypso. You look stunning.’

  She had braided her hair so that it fell in a thick plait to the middle of her back. In a wholly unnecessary gesture she had added a hint of shading under her high cheekbones and had reddened her lips – careful not to overdo it, as she’d been taught by so many professionals who had created her make-up during those earlier years.

  Tye took her hand, semi-formally, then gently pulled her closer and kissed her cheek. She smelt a little trace of soap, no hint of antiseptic, no touch of added fragrance.

  He pulled the other chair out for her while she admired the view.