by Hammond, Ray
‘It’s Doctor Liu,’ announced Sandra, from the foot of the bed. At night she napped in security mode, connected to the house systems and the island’s monitoring network as well as to the networks beyond. ‘He’s no longer an employee of the Tye Corporation.’
Theresa pulled open the drapes and in the dim light saw the small figure of the former network chief. She slid open the glass door.
‘Raymond?’
‘I’m sorry, Theresa, I know it’s late. But I need to use a system urgently, and I’m shut out of all the island’s networks.’
She stepped back, motioning for him to enter. She had heard of his sudden dismissal and she was aware that there was a growing sense of panic among the beleaguered Tye Networks engineers who were left to try and cope with the problems.
She slid the glass door shut again and looked at the sad figure of the engineer. She suddenly felt a rush of affection for him.
‘Doctor,’ greeted Sandra dryly.
‘Come into my parlour,’ Theresa said with a smile, invoking a word from her childhood. ‘You can use my system while I make us some coffee.’
Liu shook his head.
‘I really need the sort of computer power that’s available in the Control Center,’ he said. ‘I’m sure now it’s the Solaris energy stations that are causing the outages. I want to run some new tests I’ve been developing.’
He slipped a storage card out of his pocket. ‘I was hoping you might have some real processing horsepower in your department building. What level of network access do you have?’
‘Well, Ultra,’ admitted Theresa. ‘For the Anagenesis and Descartes projects.’
Raymond Liu nodded. He had correctly assumed she would possess the highest level of access.
‘If I could log on as you . . .’
Theresa smiled. ‘The best place is the main lecture theatre,’ she informed him. ‘We’ve been using that for Solaris demos and 3D holo animations – Robert’s technical support team has overloaded the place with bandwidth and processor power.’
‘If you don’t mind?’ begged Liu. ‘I realize this could cause you a problem but . . .’
Theresa smiled again. She was not in the least surprised that Raymond Liu, sacked and in disgrace, would still be trying to solve the network failures.
‘No problem, Raymond. If you’d seen Tom’s face earlier tonight when the feed from Ethiopia went down . . .’
She tailed off, recalling how hard and how visible Tye’s battle for self-control had been, forcing himself to remain calm in front of his honoured guests. It hadn’t helped that when the feed from Ethiopia had died the TV director had switched back to close-ups of Thomas Tye’s face as he attempted to make light of the technical failure that had marred his moment of triumph.
‘I hear he’s holed up in the Solaris Control Center with all my old team,’ said Liu. ‘You can imagine . . .’
Theresa nodded. She could imagine the scene very well. She picked up her VideoMate and said, ‘Call Robert.’
They waited a few seconds until a groggy voice answered.
‘Robert, I’m sorry, I know it’s late. I need a favour.’
There was a short silence, then a grunt.
‘I need you to open up Lecture Theater One for me, please.’ She paused and mugged a wince for Liu’s benefit. ‘Now, if you could bear it, Robert. It’s an emergency.’
They listened as a few more snuffles and a yawn announced that the researcher was coming to. ‘OK. Give me a little while.’
‘I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes,’ said Theresa. ‘I’ll have Doctor Liu with me. Thanks, Robert.’ She snapped her VideoMate closed.
‘I just need a few moments,’ she said as she opened the door to the living room so that Raymond Liu could wait for her in her ‘parlour’.
*
‘Jesus, that’s big.’
Pierre nodded as he watched the screen over the ATM manager’s shoulder. They were in the control tower at Hope Island Spaceport and were looking at a 3D image on the ground-level radar display. Jack Hendriksen had rostered for one of his detail to be present in the tower during all shifts over this weekend.
‘My guess is it’s a carrier,’ said Dagmar Haas, senior ATM manager for the night. ‘Probably American. No one else has anything that big.’
‘How far out?’
‘They’re twenty-five miles or so. They’ll probably turn soon.’ Hope Island’s six-mile exclusion zone was known and respected internationally.
Pierre debated whether to call Jack himself. His boss’s orders were clear: this was a delicate time, the security status on the island was Gold – the highest – and he was to be informed of any strange occurrence. And Pierre had caught something else in Jack’s voice during the briefing, something that had made the PPT chief wonder if trouble was actually anticipated.
‘Still heading our way?’
Dagmar Haas nodded and then checked herself ‘No. Look. They’re just starting the turn. They’ll stand off to the east. They’re probably on their way down to the South Atlantic.’
Pierre, although doubtful, nodded. There were none of the support vessels necessary for an extended mission.
*
‘I’m sorry to get you out of bed, Robert.’ Theresa headed down the aisle, Raymond Liu behind her. Robert was adjusting the controls at a trio of command screens beside the stage.
‘You’ve met Doctor Liu before. He needs to run some very urgent tests.’
Robert nodded, but said nothing. He too had heard the news of the network director’s dismissal. He handed them each a coffee.
Theresa stepped in to the control panel, touched the fingerprint pad, entered a password, disabled the user-monitoring system and stepped back. She motioned for Liu to step in. As he did so she nodded for Robert to join her in the front seats.
Liu took the storage card from his breast pocket again and slipped it into the system. A huge diorama of the globe filled the centre of the on-stage Holo-Theater. It was the model developed as a visual display of real-time network loadings and activity. Liu touched the controls and the world’s satellite networks rapidly started to appear, accumulating as ever-denser overlays. Liu stepped back from the console to watch these networks as they became brighter and brighter.
‘It should stop any second now,’ said Liu quietly.
Although they had watched such visual representations of network activity around the planet many times before, they were still entranced. But the display did not slow its development. All over the globe dozens of light-spots started to glow with increasing intensity, turning from white to blue, then to gold, then back again to a purer, more incandescent white.
‘As I suspected.’ Liu nodded, stepping back to the control. ‘Network activity has gone through the roof The failures occurring in the systems aren’t freak accidents, they’re the same number of breakdowns we would normally expect over a long period, but the amount of activity in the network is becoming massively amplified and accelerated when the sunlight is concentrated. It’s telescoping the failure rates of decades into just a few seconds. Now . . .’
He extracted a second storage card from his shirt pocket and slotted it into the control console.
‘I got this from a very good friend of mine an hour ago,’ he explained. ‘He’s risked his job, his stock options and his family’s lifestyle on this island by getting it to me. It’s a record of all the Solaris activity in the last two weeks.’
The image changed to a night-side view of the globe surrounded by twelve fully extended Solaris satellites hanging in space. A dateline recorder showed that the recording was frozen at one date a fortnight earlier.
‘Now . . . if I superimpose the network display . . .’
The planet’s image was again overlaid with the dense clusters of low-Earth-orbit satellite communications networks.
‘I’m going to run through the last two weeks of Solaris deployment at high speed – it should take about five minutes.’
Liu touched the control panel again and sat back.
They saw two of the mid-hemisphere Solaris stations light up to illuminate an oblong of swirling cloud and ocean extending from the east coast of Africa to the mid-Atlantic.
‘They turned on those two reflectors for two nights only to burn off a depression that was building up in the Atlantic,’ explained Liu. ‘The Met people thought it might develop into a hurricane that would blow across to spoil their big party.’
As they watched, they saw the satellite networks within this large pool of reflected light begin to glow.
Raymond Liu stood and stepped forward excitedly. ‘Look!’ he exclaimed. ‘The networks are shooting up to peak loading under the reflected sunlight – but since it’s then night-time over the Atlantic I would normally expect those networks to be operating at less than twenty per cent of peak capacity.’
Then, as the recording raced forward, the two lights over the Atlantic were turned off and each of the fourteen Solaris stations in turn went through a rapid routine of focusing wide-and narrow-beam reflections onto different parts of the spinning planet’s surface.
‘Those must be a series of routine readiness tests carried out before the official launch this weekend,’ Robert guessed.
They watched the activity level in the networks grow and then decrease as the bands of sunlight were switched on and then removed. Small dark patches were left behind in the clusters of networks that had just been activated.
‘Those dark spots represent network failures,’ observed Liu grimly. ‘The timings coincide with the failures my people reported.’
Suddenly the whole of the Indian Ocean was bathed in a wash of light.
‘Look at the date,’ urged Liu, pointing at the time display. ‘It’s three nights ago. This is the start of the process that brought the rain to Ethiopia.’
As they watched, the networks now under the light began to glow and then beams of sunlight from the Solaris stations were focused down as three small spots of brightness getting closer and closer to the East African coast.
‘They look small, but they’re each fifty or sixty miles across,’ Liu explained. ‘Look . . .’ He walked to the stage and climbed up to stand in the holo-pit, pointing.
The satellite networks above the Indian Ocean and the African continent were now in a frenzy. Amidst the white light, dark shapes were appearing as black holes, rapidly spreading through the networks.
‘That’s why you lost the feed from Ethiopia this evening.’
The artificial sunshine moved swiftly across the Indian Ocean, large black clouds appearing under the light and beneath white bursts of activity in the orbital networks.
Then the reflected sunlight projected on Africa’s eastern seaboard was switched off, while four satellites in the north-eastern quadrant lit up to create a swathe of light over Eastern Siberia – now the new state of Sybaria.
The image stopped, reaching the end of the recording.
‘The radiation from those Solaris stations is clearly causing a massive, almost unbelievable increase in network switching activity,’ Liu told his audience of two. ‘My friend got me the spec on some material called Anacamptonite, which they use as backing for the reflector sails. It’s ultra-dense, down at quantum level, so instead of letting cosmic radiation pass through, it is capturing and reflecting the photons back to Earth.’ He looked to see if they grasped the implications.
‘The Solaris satellites are therefore tearing great holes in the magnetosheath – the protective force field around the Earth. Look, I’ve built a model.’
He touched the remote control and they saw a small Earth surrounded by a huge tear-shaped orange glow streaming out into the darkness on the night side.
‘The sun constantly spews out plasma towards the Earth – free electrons, protons and helium nuclei – but the magnetic field produced in the core of our planet is able to push this plasma safely around the Earth. That’s what forms this tear shape of gases behind the planet, on the side away from the sun: they rejoin at what’s called the point of reconnection, thousands of kilometres behind the Earth. They become densely concentrated when they meet up . . . here.’
Liu stepped into the model and touched the point where the tail of the magnetic field began to form. Then he fingered his remote control again and the Solaris stations were evident in a semicircle behind the Earth.
‘Look,’ he urged, unnecessarily. ‘Most of the Solaris stations are positioned over the path leading towards the point of reconnection! But if you bounce that concentrated plasma back towards the night side of the planet there’s no magnetic repulse. It’s like a trapdoor into the planet’s protective magnetic shield – you’ll tear great holes in it.’
Now they understood. They were aghast.
‘When the Solaris beams are tightly focused and used together those plasma particles can produce charges of billions of megajoules. They are what’s causing the binary flips to occur in the individual switches in the satellites’ processors. The shielding we build in is only good enough to withstand normal space radiation – but these reflectors have concentrated and amplified that to a power of twelve or more and are changing polarities within the magnetosphere. That’s why we’re getting all these failures. If this goes on, everything electrical or magnetic on our planet will be affected. We won’t even know where north and south are.’
Liu shrugged, then allowed himself a half-smile. The coincidence of the Solaris energy transmission with accelerated network activity and the resultant failures provided a clear, irrefutable warning. The Phoebus Project was interrupting the Earth’s magnetic defences. His theory was proved. All he had to do now was find a way to show his models to Thomas Tye.
Slowly, Robert got to his feet. ‘Theresa,’ he said, hoarsely. ‘Have you thought . . .’
She shot a sudden look at him. She had now. ‘Quick,’ she said, jumping to her feet.
Raymond Liu ran back down the stairs to join them at the console.
‘I’ll pull up the switching meter first,’ said Robert.
‘We’re going to check on the Descartes experiment,’ Theresa told Liu. ‘René’s development stage is totally dependent on levels of switching activity in the networks.’
Robert’s hands flew over the controls. The image of the globe and the Solaris satellites disappeared, then a red meter headed Transactions appeared at the top of the Holo-Theater.
‘My God,’ cried Theresa. ‘Look at those transactions . . .’ The meter was running, too fast to read. ‘Freeze it,’ she commanded.
‘A thousand to the power of six,’ reported Robert in a small voice. Theresa exchanged a look with him. ‘Go to full sensorial,’ she ordered.
Robert touched a button. Suddenly the Holo-Theater was filled with jagged light, so bright that they had to look away. Simultaneously, the loudspeakers in the auditorium emitted a cacophony of sound. Liu forced himself to look back at the stage. The image in the holo-pit was a strobe display of random fast-cut images from news broadcasts, videos, films, photo archives: all flashing on and off in split seconds. The sounds from the speakers were a jumble of shreds of soundtracks, music, screams and laughter. They suddenly smelled oil, then flame and they heard a loud clanking. They turned and saw that the hydraulic ramps of the HydraChairs in the lecture theatre were driving the empty seats in wild gyrations.
Theresa reached in to shut off the sound. The frantic clanking of the HydraChairs continued so she reached in again to cut off the remote kinetics and ScentSim feeds.
‘Is this real-time?’ asked Liu.
Theresa nodded.
‘Congratulations, Professor,’ said Raymond Liu distantly. ‘You seem to have achieved emergence in my networks.’
*
Ron Deakin woke after a sweet and apparently dreamless sleep. His psyche knew the task was almost finished and was pre-empting the conscious relief he would feel when it was truly done.
Later in the day the United Nations’ twin initiatives aga
inst the global monopolies of the Tye Corporation would be launched. Arrest warrants would be issued for Thomas Tye on fourteen counts of human-rights violation, including illegal human genetic experimentation and culpable manslaughter. Further writs and arrest warrants would be issued for fraud, intellectual-property theft, commercial misrepresentation and, reflecting his corporation’s role as network administrator, criminal malfeasance. Over three dozen other Tye Corporation executives would also be indicted. Deakin’s legal team knew that their accusations would be met with a counter-barrage of legal action, but the result of the arrest warrants would be that Thomas Tye and his most senior executives would be confined to his island. If they set foot on the soil of any UN member territory they would face immediate arrest.
Then the officers of the special shell corporations established by the World Bank would announce a hostile takeover of the Tye Corporation. News of these two events would be timed for release mid-evening, in time for the opening of the Asian markets and for the Monday-morning editions of the US newspapers.
But today was a Sunday and, as on so many weekends in recent months, Deakin found himself alone in a room on the third floor of the UN’s Marriott Hotel. In an hour he had to confer with the lawyers to go over their charges, injunctions and writs. Then he was meeting with Yoav Chelouche and Joe Tinkler for an update on their progress with the purchase of Tye Corporation shares. Then it was to be a working lunch with the Secretary-General, the SecGen’s diplomatic team and his own immediate boss, Jan Amethier. He knew this would represent the lull before the storm for the diplomats. They would have to spend days thereafter explaining and providing reassurance to the representatives of their member states.
He pushed himself out of bed, pulled on his robe and padded to the door. He undid the security lock, slipped off the bolt and opened the door a crack. There was no one to be seen in the corridor. Ron Deakin stepped into the corridor and scooped up the bulky New York Times he had ordered. Despite the phenomenal growth of network marketing, many local retailers still chose to pad out these Sunday newsprint editions with their small ads.
