View from Ararat
Page 8
Certainly, their range of interests was at least as varied as the average nation’s. And their annual budget surpluses were usually a whole lot healthier.
In the complex internationalised economies that grew up on Old Earth after the Hundred Years’ Depression and the establishment of the World Government Charter in 2101ad, corporate size and reach were vitally important, but the key was diversity.
And the great conglomerates were creatures of the new order – which meant, among other things, genetics and pharmaceuticals, scientific and medical Research, manufacturing for export (a growth area, following the independence of Deucalion), munitions, privatised municipal police forces and national security forces, and even the direct ownership of whole precincts of major cities – especially in the poorer areas of what had centuries earlier been referred to as the Third World.
In many places they were the law, accountable only to themselves – and their shareholders. They were untouchable.
They buried their own dead, and their own mistakes.
As previously mentioned, one of the major fears during the earlier periods of space-exploration had been the accidental introduction of killer plagues from places other than Earth, plagues that could destroy all life on the planet.
No one could predict what microscopic disasters were lurking out there in the cosmos. There was a real possibility of bugs against which humanity had absolutely no natural resistance and against which our scientists had developed no defences.
The conglomerates established their own strategies for handling such emergencies – including the creation of well-funded, official-sounding agencies (with names like the Euro-American Medical Research Board, or the Asia/Pacific Health Maintenance Cooperative, or the Global Health Organisation).
It is not difficult to see why they might go to all that trouble. And unfortunately, it had very little to do with being responsible international citizens.
In fact, the decision was entirely economic. These were the corporations supplying the desperately needed raw materials to a resource-starved world. They were the ones who owned the mining-rigs and the ore-shuttles and the processing plants. In real terms, they even owned the workers who did the processing.
It was Earth’s ‘new feudalism’ – the phenomenon that AJL Tolhurst talked about in his book, Deucalion: The First New World.
If anything dangerous was going to find its way back to Earth, they were the ones who would most certainly be transporting it. And this meant that they would probably also be the first to know.
And powerful as it might be, even a huge multinational conglomerate could not easily afford the kind of litigation, or the negative publicity, that even a relatively small outbreak could generate.
But it was more than just fear that drove them. There were huge profits to be made from extraterrestrial medical Research, and not just unexpected cures to some of the increasing health problems of an overcrowded planet.
If a plague were to start, and they were set up to speedily develop a cure, what government wouldn’t spend whatever that cure might cost if it meant saving its dying citizens?
And, of course, in corporate terms there were at least two obvious advantages in having the monopoly on information and being able to control news of any outbreak.
Number one: Given the total control the corporations exercised on the production process – from mining to delivery of the final product – any problem resulting from its own activities would inevitably begin in a company-owned area. So even if the outbreak was your fault, it was also under your authority. No individual (or state) would be able to prove it – and sue you for billions – if you controlled all the evidence.
Number two: The advantage in the race for a cure, and the profits flowing from it, was in the hands of whoever had the head start. The International Industrial Research secrecy laws actually protected your monopoly, and they were about the only international laws that had any teeth . . .
Living Quarters (Research Personnel)
Seoul Bio-Control Strategy Centre
Asia/Southeast Sector, Old Earth
May 31, 2396ad
SARAH
1 am. The shadow moves slowly from the door to the bed, stepping carefully in the dark room, silent as death.
On the bed the young woman stirs, then settles again into sleep. For a moment the dark figure hesitates, staring down at her.
Beyond the window the moon slides out from behind the cloud-cover, sending a narrow shaft of light slanting across the room, illuminating her face, and he moves slightly to position his body between the light and his sleeping victim.
Again she stirs, but this time her eyelids flicker open. And in that instant, caught between waking and sleeping, Sarah Dimarco glimpses her fate. She opens her mouth to scream, but the sound never comes.
Moments later the apartment door slides open, then closed.
For a few seconds more the room is bathed in ghostly white light, then a dark thunderhead drifts across the face of the full moon, and outside a distant rumbling sounds its warning of the coming storm.
While inside, nothing moves.
Medical Research Facility
Edison (Southwest)
5/1/203 Standard
CHARLIE’S STORY
Galen looked up as I came in.
‘Got it?’ he asked, but the look on my face stopped him. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Hansen . . .’ I began. Then I paused and stared out of the window for a few seconds, trying to compose myself. It didn’t work.
I looked back at him. ‘He’s dead.’
I watched his jaw drop. I knew exactly how he felt.
It’s strange. I mean, I’d never actually met the guy. How could I? He lived trillions of kilometres away on a planet I’d never be able to visit, even if I had the slightest inclination to do so, which I didn’t. But I’d shared my work with him. And I’d learned hugely from his years of hard-won experience. I felt as if I knew him.
I felt gut-sick.
‘Dead?’ Galen repeated the word stupidly. ‘How?’
I didn’t answer. Instead I leaned in towards the v-a pick-up and mumbled my access-code. The screen cleared and a vid- message appeared. A young woman’s face.
‘Pause,’ I ordered, and the picture froze on the screen. I turned to face him.
‘It was an embedded file, the same as the last one. Except that this time it wasn’t Hansen who sent it.’ I indicated the frozen screen with a movement of my head, but my eyes stayed focused on his. ‘The woman on the vid is Sarah Dimarco, Hansen’s right-hand. You’ve read her stuff on the Brazilian retro-ebola vaccination program, and the work she did on whole-population inherited bacterium-susceptibility screening. It was the basis for the Crichton/Reynolds DNA-manipulation protocols.’
‘That Sarah Dimarco?’ He was impressed, with good reason. ‘I thought she was freelance.’
‘She was, but Hansen must have held out some major sweetener, because she joined him at the Institute in Seoul three or four years ago.’
Again I leaned forward. ‘Continue.’
And the image came to life.
Sarah Dimarco looked barely old enough to have graduated from med-school, but with a cv as impressive and varied as hers she would have to have been older than she looked.
It’s often said that Research is a young person’s game. Galen and I didn’t exactly have mortgages on rocking chairs ourselves. But we didn’t have anywhere near the kind of record of Sarah Dimarco.
As I watched her on the screen, it was clear she was struggling to hold it together.
‘Miss Jacklin . . .’ Pause. ‘Charlie . . .’ Longer pause.
She was staring straight into the vid pick-up, like she was uncomfortable talking – even to someone thirty-four light-years away, who wouldn’t receive the file for another year or so.
‘My name is Sarah Dimarco. I work . . . worked . . . with Professor Hansen. And the reason why I’m talking to you instead of him is . . .’
I leaned forward and increased the gain on the audio.
Quarantine Camp, Old Wieta Reserve
Edison Sector (East Central)
5/1/203 Standard
MARISA
9:14:00. The itching in her hand has eased, but what has replaced it is less than comforting. She had lost almost all the feeling in the palm of her hand, and there is an uncomfortable tightness in the muscles of her forearm. She rubs at it absently and bends to brush an unruly strand of hair away from her daughter’s face.
The hut is small, and Marisa Gough dreams quietly of the time they will be able to leave their cramped quarters and really start their new life.
With the money they managed to save on Earth before they embarked, and the promise of good jobs with the mining companies on the Fringes, they have a bright future. Wasn’t that what Allan argued so often back on Earth, before he finally wore her down?
It is the truth, of course, and deep inside she has always known it. But to leave everything you have ever known, everything that is familiar and safe. To make the break . . .
It took a while for her to raise the nerve.
She coughs slightly, and the dull ache in her lungs sharpens momentarily. Her neck and back are aching and stiff, and the skin on her cheeks feels tender, like the after-effects of too much sun.
Probably some kind of virus . . . She shakes her head. No matter where you go, you can’t escape the flu. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go check out the local quack.
Medical Research Facility
Edison (Southwest)
5/1/203 Standard
CHARLIE’S STORY
There are days when you lie in bed waiting to drift off and suddenly you realise that you can’t remember a single thing that happened since the moment you woke up that morning. Those are the days when you just do the mechanical things, going through the motions, doing what you have to do, but all the while your entire brain is in neutral. Galen claimed it never happened to him, and I’m willing to believe him. But Galen is special.
Myself, I used to have a lot of days like that. Still do on occasions.
But then there are the days you know you’ll never forget, no matter how long you live, no matter how many things happen to you in the meantime.
The day we received that file from Sarah Dimarco was one of those days.
First it was the news about Hansen. The official version was a massive stroke. Death was almost instantaneous according to the attending physician, a man called Ryker. I did my homework on him later – he was a company quack working for MacMillan/Tseng/Hartog. Hansen did Research for one of their subsidiaries in Seoul, which was, of course, how he’d accidentally stumbled on the GHO data about CRIOS.
It was no wonder Sarah Dimarco was so spaced-out. She spoke for about five minutes, and you could almost taste the fear in her. After all, she was right-hand, and if his death was something other than a popped cerebral artery, she was in a whole lot of trouble herself.
Apparently Hansen had been following up on the Crystal Death info he’d uncovered and shuttled to us, and everything he’d learned was contained in the secret embedded file we were now accessing. But he’d screwed up.
He was accessing things way above his clearance level and he’d left a telltale entry-code signature behind when he’d had to pull out of the company’s central data frame in a hurry.
Which was when he’d told Sarah everything.
Three days later he was dead, and his entire Research output had been frozen under the industrial secrecy powers retained by the company.
Which was nothing unusual in itself. After all, he was being paid by them at the time of his death, and until they could check through everything contained in the files they wouldn’t know exactly how valuable his legacy to them might be. It was common practice in corporate Research.
What wasn’t so common was the fact that they’d also frozen the data-files of the whole section, including those of his chief Research assistant, one Sarah Dimarco.
The only reason we were viewing this particular file, she said, was that Hansen had been a step ahead of them. Instead of ether-linking with his private punchboard to download, which was simple to intercept and trace, he’d used an archaic hard-wired casserite zip-cube, saved directly, then given her the cube, with instructions for its distribution should he suddenly die ‘of old age’ in the next few days.
He’d also given her the name of someone who would know how to get the information onto the next shuttle to Deucalion – which was the only reason we were accessing it at all.
Finally she was finished, and the image dissolved into the data-mode screen as page after page of reports, detailed information and analysis scrolled slowly down in front of us.
Galen reached forward and increased the scroll-speed. He does that all the time, and it annoys the hell out of me. I mean, I’m no slouch when it comes to reading, but he’s a freak. He’s so quick that . . .
Put it this way, one day when you have nothing better to do with your time, see how much you can take in in a single second from a 68-centimetre screen full of Research data.
Galen can read it, then quote it chapter and verse. And he can keep it up for ages. It’s scary to watch. And it’s damned annoying when he speeds the scroll rate up towards fifty or sixty pages a minute to review a whole project and you’re vainly trying to keep up with him.
He doesn’t read like that all the time, of course. Once he has an overview of what he’s looking at, he’ll slow down and go back to the start, studying it one page at a time, at something near a normal human rate. And usually that’s when I come in. He’ll give me the digest-version, and we’ll get down to the nuts and bolts of analysis. It’s a good system, and it’s worked for us ever since we started working together at the Academy.
But this wasn’t just any Research project. I was getting a particularly uncomfortable premonition about what was unfolding in front of us, and I was impatient. I wanted to know now, not when Galen Sibraa, boy genius, was ready to let me in on the secret.
I reached across him and deliberately slowed the scroll-rate to snail-paced. He looked at me like he was about to say something, then he smiled.
‘Sorry.’ And he almost sounded it. ‘Do you want me to go back and—’
‘Nah.’ I sat on the console and stared down at him. ‘Just bring me up to speed, and we can go on from here.’
My eyes were glazing over.
Fourteen hours and ten litres of Ocra later I was way beyond overload. So was Galen, but there was no way we could stop. What we had in front of us was a minutely detailed description of the Apocalypse, coldly stated in objective scientific language.
In the end, I think that was the most frightening thing about it – the fact that there were people who could look at the facts and statistics and the projected fatalities of worst-case scenarios and see only the numbers.
The end of the world as we know it. Wasn’t that the old phrase?
And the idiots at the GHO had been treating it as an exercise in corporate damage-control. If it’s good for profits, it’s good for the corporation, and screw the human cost . . .
Okay, I’m an idealist. So shoot me. At least I wouldn’t have kept something like this under wraps, just because it might have an effect on company profits.
When I start waxing philosophical it’s a sign that I’m getting tired.
Suddenly Galen shook his head and thumbed the controls of his chair, reversing into the centre of the office, before doing a two-wheel, seven-twenty, twice around clockwise with his eyes shut tight.
I stood up and moved across to where he was sitting. I placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘You OK?’
‘Just stretching my
legs.’
He opened his eyes and stared into mine. Most people I know get pretty self-conscious around Galen. I don’t. I stared right back and blew him a kiss.
He smiled. ‘Tease!’
I returned to the desk and I knew he was watching the way I moved. And for just a moment I didn’t give a stuff about CRIOS or anything else.
He manoeuvred himself back behind the console, just as I brought up the next screen. Another report:
* * *
GLOBAL HEALTH ORGANISATION
Confidential Memorandum
(punishment code # 23/513 applies for any breach)
* * *
PROJECT:
CRIOS
STATUS:
ALPHA (LEVEL FIVE CLEARANCE – NTK)
SITE OF DATA-SOURCE:
SEOUL BIO-CONTROL STRATEGY CENTRE
(RELAYED FROM GHO CENTRE FOR COMMUNICABLE DISEASE CONTROL, NEW YORK, ATLANTIC/NORTHWEST SECTOR)
FILE ORIGINATION DATE:
09/12/2332ad
TOPIC:
COSTA RICAN ISOMORPHOUS OSSIFICATION SYNDROME (CRIOS) MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES
RELATED DATA:
# CLINICAL CRYSTALLOGRAPHY
# CRIOS POSTMORTEM/PATHOLOGICAL STUDIES
# DESCRIPTION OF THE POSSIBLE ORIGINS AND SYMPTOMS ASSOCIATED WITH COSTA RICAN ISOMORPHOUS OSSIFICATION SYNDROME (CRIOS), ALSO KNOWN AS ‘CRYSTAL DEATH’
# DISEASES OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL/UNKNOWN ORIGIN
# ELECTRON MICROSCOPE STUDIES OF CRIOS SEED-CRYSTAL SAMPLES
# FOMITE DISEASE-TRANSMISSION FACTORS (COMPARATIVE DATA – GASTRO-BACTERIA/STAFF/E-COLI/TETANUS/HEPATITIS/CRIOS)
# HAEMATOLOGY (cf: ECCENTRIC BLOOD PATHOLOGY)
# INORGANIC CONTAMINANTS – TREATMENT REGIMENS
# QUARANTINE PROCEDURES – INCURABLE/FATAL INFECTIOUS DISEASES