Not quite knowing what to say or whether the answer could save him or not, and finding it hard to focus on anything else except his excruciating pain and need for oxygen, the poor wretch hesitates for a moment. His head is shaken vigorously in demand of an answer — his shoes scratch harshly around on the floor, causing his torso and legs to writhe about wildly. Then, the grip around his neck is loosened slightly, giving him an opportunity to speak, which he compliantly takes. “You-you’re … you’re Henry Clay.”
“No … I’m Henry Thirty-Eight.” Henry abruptly tightens his grip until his victim falls unconscious just seconds later; he then allows him to fall limply to the floor while glancing at the door and lunging across to grab the blade lying by a cubicle. He proceeds to send it deep into the back of the man’s neck, directing it up towards and through the brainstem. He turns away from the pooling blood, moves swiftly towards the door of the exit, and stands firmly up against it. He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out the phone provided to him by Abdul and orders it to give him a call.
After three rings, Abdul Answers, “Good Morning, Henry. You’re up ni—”
“I’m in the men’s on the first … the ground floor. I need assistance with one body, a lot of blood, a change of clothes, and a clean-up operation … in more ways than one. Do you think you can handle that? Is that within your capabilities?”
“Oh, I see… Just stay there.”
“I’m not going anywhere, I can tell you.”
Twenty minutes later
Standing in his suite on the 10th floor and wearing a clean suit, Henry looks out of the living room windows. Abdul comes up and stands by his side after pocketing his phone. “We’re obviously going to have to be more careful with you. I’ve arranged a security detail for the rest of your stay.”
Henry considers how things were dealt with so cleanly and efficiently, and wonders about all the work and connections involved in keeping such an incident hidden and contained. “So that’s it, then? We can just put this morning’s events behind us?”
“Essentially. The main thing is that you’re not implicated and there’s no body, etcetera. Whoever organised it, will know, but, then … we sent them a message, didn’t we?”
“That we did.”
“You’re no longer an easy target, Henry … not least of all because of how you handled yourself in there, by the way.”
“I have my moments.”
“Let’s just work towards making their underestimation of you more pervasive, shall we?”
“That’s my intention, exactly.” Although satisfied with the results of his little opportunistic experiment, Henry still feels uneasy about the background nature of his new-found support and knows that he’ll never really be comfortable with so many unanswered questions surrounding its delivery. All he really knows is that he needs to be pragmatic and political about getting past the series of hurdles that are before him, lest they destroy him and the prospects of his business … and all that’s implicated beyond that.
Part 2
For the remainder of the conference, Henry worked tirelessly with the aid of a concoction of pills and replenishing drinks. As a result of his series of meetings, informal and tentative agreements and arrangements were made with various nations and companies, many of which would later lead to formal deals, contracts and collaborations that would assist Henry in developing his R&D programme and taking on his corporate and political opponents.
As Henry left the conference and headed back to Houston, he felt confident that the tide had at last turned and the necessary connections had been made that would lead to a substantial shift in power and a restructuring of the world’s major oil needs. Nevertheless, an underlying disquietude regarding all his newly forged relationships remained as he was all too aware of their fickle nature — the way they could dissolve so quickly with the changing circumstances. This was something that he saw as being not just a constant challenge but a mounting one as well in what was an era of extreme flux with highly contested speculations and prescriptions regarding the future directions of science, technology and society. Consequently, Henry decided he would need to set up an intelligence department in his company that would focus intently on understanding the interests and agendas of various agents and groups in his emerging network of allies, and attempt to form and implement tactical and strategic responses to potential areas of opposition as well as opportunity.
Over the weeks following the conference, Henry found that his political and media concerns dissipated and fell into the background, and SynOTex’s distribution mechanisms were reactivated with the help of a number of contracts made with a number of companies that proved to be quite reliable and supportive of SynOTex’s and the industry’s objectives. Although Henry was initially impressed by the quick turnaround, over the months and years that followed, he developed an eye for what was being facilitated in the background and what was merely pure chance and the result of his own doing, which appeared to be very little: all he felt confident about crediting to his own agency was the effort he put into keeping up with and accommodating the opportunities that continued to emerge all around him.
As far as the R&D programme he had proposed at the conference was concerned, it received considerable and continuing funding from a variety of sources, and, within five years, SynOTex was in a position to begin testing beta technologies in select companies and countries, which was eventually followed by a massive distribution campaign over the following decade. Henry was evidently happy to have a large chunk of the resulting economic windfall; he was also proud to be doing his part to help smooth out the global energy production transition, which had still suffered intermittent periods of supply shortfalls in a number of areas with the associated consequences. Despite the apparent success of his programme, for Henry, there was still considerable cause for consternation and concern regarding the future of his business…
Henry became aware through his own observations and the research of his intelligence department that the interests of the new-energy corporations, the governments of the world, and the international institutions were gradually becoming aligned as the corporations sought more power through association with the establishment and vice versa. Predictably, Henry saw his own products and services and those of his cohort being usurped and controlled by the wealthy elite, who proceeded to manage them to their own advantage and that of an ever-narrowing exclusive subset of the citizenry. This resulted in a more severely unequal distribution of resources than was necessary given what was then available: the gap between the new-energy haves and have-nots within cities, regions and between nations was made even more dramatic than what it had been in previous decades with no signs of recourse looming.
There were consequences to this that needed to be addressed to minimise or prevent damage to investments: in order to combat the mounting tensions inherent to these socio-economic conditions, the notion of isolated safety zones quickly proliferated the world, partitioning the impoverished from the wealthy in unprecedented ways, which resulted in a worsening incidence of poverty, neglect, ill health, disease, hunger, starvation and early deaths. This situation was whitewashed politically by blaming a lack of appropriate and available resources and technology, thus diverting attention away from the lack of political will and the greediness of the gatekeepers.
Henry expected that it was his background alliance that in part was responsible for allowing and promoting this dismaying situation through the promotion of friction-based and self-interested strategies of development. He assumed this was the case despite the fact that the alliance had appeared to be particularly supportive of his operation, which made it look to the untrained eye that the programme was moving incrementally towards its ‘natural’ conclusion — worldwide delivery and accessibility based on need. In contrast, a more astute perception, which Henry had been developing for decades, could see past these often quite powerful and persuasive attempts at bamboozling and beguiling observers, even relativ
e insiders, such as Henry.
Gradually, Henry came to see his actions as supporting an elite minority that he still knew little to nothing about and could do barely anything to influence despite the best efforts of his intelligence department to provide answers and recommendations. He formed the view that his personal agency regarding the direction of SynOTex and the ISOA had been hijacked; least of all was he able to go successfully against the grain — as he had deliberately experimented with on occasions — because possibilities would just vaporise, and he would find himself compelled towards a more ‘sensible’ course that would have a string of alluring opportunities presented to him in a timely manner. Ironically, by saving SynOTex, he had lost not only the business but a large part of himself as well. After more than a decade of being manipulated by his hidden supporters, Henry came to a turning point: he knew he had to do more than what he was being offered. He craved the freedom to make his own decisions and engage in the actions that he saw as being beneficial on his own terms; he really just wanted to become his own agent, to effect change his way. He wasn’t prepared to suppress this need any longer…
Knowing that he would have to do something quite different and separate from the activities of SynOTex, he examined his resources and surroundings, and planned a careful course of action accordingly. He proceeded, with consent, to orchestrate the firing of his most talented researcher after a series of planned mishaps and blunders over a three-month period had made it plausible; the researcher was then set up at home and charged with putting together a core R&D team, sourcing required technology, and finding appropriate accommodation for a laboratory, which ended up being half a floor in an office building visible from Henry’s desk at SynOTex — the laboratory was essentially hidden in plain sight as a new technology start-up.
Henry kept in contact from a distance with the aid of encryption technologies, and, within six months, the laboratory was adequately staffed, equipped and operational. From then on, Henry found that more and more of his time was spent thinking about how to develop his secret laboratory’s R&D programme further. He also became interested in how he could divest himself of his input into the main activities of SynOTex and the ISOA. Thirteen months later, he resigned from his position as president of the ISOA, stating that it was time for a change in leadership for the good of the industry — the credibility of this angle was something that he developed over time until it was readily accepted by most. Additionally, over a matter of months, his role at SynOTex gradually became more streamlined and a lot less labour intensive with two unseen substitutes performing those responsibilities that couldn’t be delegated to others in management or that he just had to do himself in the flesh, something he worked hard at keeping to an absolute minimum. Despite these changes, Henry felt that he should still remain at SynOTex’s head office on most days for the sake of appearances, although he gradually withdrew and remained hidden and incommunicado behind closed doors.
It was decided in consultation with his chief researchers early on that the R&D programme of his new laboratory would focus on the following areas of key importance: 1) the main factors and future prospects of promoting change for the greater good of humankind and the world system in general; and 2) scientific and technological advancements that would facilitate the augmenting of reality, primarily in terms of artificial intelligence and general nanotechnology applications.
Having had experience with the potential of nanotechnology in SynOTex’s business model, Henry had become interested in the wider implications and was inspired by all the developments in the multidisciplinary field that had occurred over the century, which he could see were heading towards a series of significant transformations. Because of this, he was keen to get involved and was focused in particular on promoting nanotechnology potentials for transitioning to a post-scarcity framework with environmental and urban planning control mechanisms being two of the major outcomes; he was also aware of the need to investigate the potential for mishandling future technologies and developments, and, in response, to consider prevention measures.
In addition, in terms of artificial intelligence, he was quite concerned about the prospects and dire possibilities of the posed yet still-elusive Technological Singularity, which had become an increasing research interest and media concern since the early years of the century due to the breakthroughs in technoscience and the preponderance of products that were continuing to become available on the market and distributed widely; although the more ambitious dates set for the Technological Singularity had been revised many times as they had come and gone, more dates for the event were constantly being set. With the anticipated and much-reviled future of this still somewhere down the track, but for how long no one knew, Henry’s sense of urgency to participate resulted in his putting a lot of attention and funds into establishing a Technological Singularity R&D and response programme that would bring further advances in technologies for augmenting intelligence through cyborgism and semantic web interfacing, and, again, assessing misuse and prevention measures. Despite having always been sceptical about the possibility of a Technological Singularity in such an ineffective bureaucratic and politicking world, he nevertheless felt it was prudent to pursue this through a thorough-going R&D programme, lest the sceptics were proven wrong and found themselves consequently unprepared. In an attempt to avoid this, Henry was ready to put in as much money as was required over the following years — hundreds of billions of dollars if necessary.
By 2048, the programme had a second laboratory in Texas with a total of 300 working scientist-technologists on board, but they had only just managed to spend their first billion dollars — as Henry well knew, nurturing R&D programmes took time, yet it still turned out that his programmes weren’t as expensive as he had expected, nor as easy to expand. Realising this early on, Henry had begun providing surplus funds to a wide range of other R&D programmes in targeted areas, some of which he hoped might end up supplementing and informing his own programmes’ needs for knowledge, resources and technologies — with so much quality R&D occurring worldwide, this external funding quickly ballooned to over three hundred billion dollars.
It wasn’t until several years down the track that Henry felt another change was needed: the worsening social and environmental conditions in Texas indicated to him that his operations needed to relocate north to Canada — from his point of view, the future of Texas was something that he couldn’t bring himself to sit around and watch; he certainly wasn’t prepared to allow his interests to be jeopardised by remaining in the soon-to-be failed state like so many of the others. While planning the move, he began re-evaluating his values and what he saw as being important in his life — this was when he felt that he needed to experiment with the idea of providing opportunity to individual agents who had demonstrated an understanding of the nature of the challenges that the world faced, and who had a strong desire and commitment to seek substantive change.
How he came to this was a matter of serendipity: during his introspective period, one of his research assistants suggested he take a look at a little-known book written by a certain Ikaros Jonez entitled: The Philosophy of Action in Extreme Conditions: The Memoirs of a Free Agent. After devouring the book, he committed to making Ikaros an offer to be provided with the means to explore his approach to ‘change agency’ more fully. It was Henry’s speculation that just perhaps this Ikaros Jonez would have more luck than he had had and might ever have, if not partly because of Ikaros’s hunger for knowledge mixed with his dogged determination to effect change one way or another. This was something that Henry felt he himself was just starting to get the hang of.
After having a research assistant investigate Ikaros and track his activities, Henry finally made direct contact when Ikaros landed in New York during his book promotion tour. At their one-and-only meeting in Houston shortly after, Ikaros accepted the challenge offered to him and left ready to embark on a complete change of course, his mind brimming with possibilities for the future.
• • •
Outside Toronto, Canada: several months after arriving
Henry stands on the balcony of his secluded country residence looking out at the scenery. Inside, on both above-ground levels and in the large, extended basement, are ten information researchers and twenty scientist-technologists working on parts of his R&D programmes — the other employees are now distributed in various locations around the world but are in near-constant contact with the operation’s hub.
NEW WORLD TRILOGY (Trilogy Title) Page 24
