The Black Hole

by Hammond, Ray

  Makowski nodded. ‘You’ve got almost six weeks. We can be certain that the Americans won’t give in easily, nor will their allies.’

  ‘Even after London and Silicon Valley?’ asked Pace.

  Makowski shook his head. ‘Even after the first two weapons are deployed I am certain the transhumans will still cling to power. But we have to prepare the voters to take back their governments when the time comes. The media and the voters need to have to have seen physical demonstrations of our technology before we present our final ultimatum. Then they will understand why there is no choice but to turn back from this madness.’

  ‘Well, my administrators are ready,’ Pace told his party’s global leader. ‘We have people on secret standby in every U.S. state and in every country in the European union.’

  ‘Excellent. Tell them to prepare for power,’ said Makowksi. ‘Our friends in the government of Venezuela have prepared the resolution to put before the UN.’

  ‘Are you ready on the ground in France?’ asked Colonel Poliza.

  ‘We are ready,’ Makowski told him. ‘We have all the logistics, all the arms and all the explosives in place. All we need is the men you are training up for us.’

  ‘They’ll be there on time,’ Poliza assured him. ‘And a number of FARCs most experienced unit leaders are prepared to accept our financial incentives and join the mission. It will be a strong force.’

  ‘Have we got any inside help yet?’ asked Sergy Larov, speaking for the first time. ‘We can’t run the collider without the access codes.’

  ‘Our French volunteers are arranging that tomorrow morning,’ said Makowski.

  Eight

  By 7.30 a.m. the residential streets on the outskirts of Geneva were starting to get busy. It was a glorious late June morning and local residents wanted to be out in the sunshine.

  Professor Bo Lundgren, a sixty-two year-old theoretical physicist, touched the air conditioning control on his new BMW’s dashboard the moment its electric engine was switched on. The car’s computer display told him that the exterior temperature was already 22.7 degrees.

  Pulling away from his apartment block on Avenue d’Aïre, the Director of Research at the nearby Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, an academic research centre better known by its acronym, CERN, drove towards the traffic lights at the end of the street. There was already a short queue of cars waiting.

  With a sigh, Professor Lundgren came to a halt at the tail-end of the line.

  ‘Find me some news,’ he told his external Mondo VA, Einstein. The physicist loved having an assistant called Einstein, although he hadn’t yet upgraded to the newer implanted VAs with all the sensory enhancement they offered. Despite being a man of science and director of the world’s largest particle accelerator, Lundgren felt squeamish about having a chip embedded inside his skull. This was despite the fact it would be smaller than a pinhead and could be inserted with keyhole microsurgery under a local anesthetic.

  The car’s sound system flicked on. ‘Political leaders are gathering to—’

  Suddenly the radio went dead. ‘Einstein?’ called Lundgren. But there was no response.

  Without warning, there was a sudden hard bang and a jolt from the rear and Bo Lundgren was thrown forward. He glanced up quickly into his rear-view mirror. A black Mercedes taxi had rear-ended him.

  ‘Einstein?’ called Lundgren again. But there was no response from either his VA or from the car’s information systems.

  With an exasperated grunt, the professor switched off his car engine, unsnapped his seatbelt, unlatched the central locking system and turned to climb out of the new BMW saloon. He knew he would now have to go through what might be a long and protracted argument about fault and responsibility for the damage, all without help or witness from Einstein. Taxi drivers were always difficult about traffic accidents. Insurers often insisted they pay personally for repairs to their own vehicles.

  Reminding himself to keep calm, the diminutive particle physicist stepped out of his car and into the bright sunlight of the Swiss morning. Lundgren noticed that the driver of the taxi was making no effort to get out of his vehicle.

  Walking back towards the cab, the scientist bent to peer into the open window. With a shock he saw that the young driver had a hand-gun nestled in his lap. The snub barrel was pointing directly towards Lundgren’s face.

  Instinctively, the professor sprang back but, as he did so, he felt four strong hands grab him by both his upper arms.

  ‘Get in the back,’ ordered a guttural French-accented voice. The rear door of the cab swung open as if to welcome him.

  Four vice-like hands pushed him hard towards the back of the taxi, but Lundgren suddenly rebelled. Ransom kidnappings were not unknown in the city and the scientist had an abiding fear of any sort of imprisonment. Twisting violently, Lundgren managed to free one of his arms from his assailants but, as he turned to fight his way free, the man from whose grip he had escaped, stuck a gas-powered syringe needle into the right side of his neck.

  The professor crumpled quickly and the two younger men put their hands under the physicist’s arms and bundled his unconscious form into the rear of the cab.

  The two pedestrian assailants ¬– both wearing ski masks, both trained HFDA volunteers – stepped back into a car that was waiting behind the taxi and reversed, leaving the way clear for the cab to back away from the physicist’s abandoned BMW.

  With a squeal of tortured tyres on tarmac the two vehicles – first the Mercedes taxi and then the saloon car, completed U-turns and raced away in the peaceful suburban sunshine, carrying with them the vital inside help that was required for the HFDA’s forthcoming mission.

  *

  Wearing a tight black T-shirt and hip-hugging, fashionable black trousers, Joel Cummings strode out into the stage lights and waved at the large audience.

  The recently appointed replacement CEO of the Mondo Corporation looked lithe and fit and he appeared to be about thirty-five or forty years of age. But in chronological terms the man who had stepped in to fill Harrold Darrenbaum’s shoes as company boss was seventy-two. As the former president of Mondo Transhuman Technologies, a division of the parent corporation which specialised in products based on the convergence of computer intelligence and enhanced human biology, Cummings was a walking advertisement for the effectiveness of his company’s rejuvenation therapies. Silicon Valley was no longer the exclusive preserve of the naturally young.

  Cummings was on the stage of the Mondo Presentation Theatre, in the middle of the firm’s sprawling computer technology campus in Mountain View, Northern California – only one of six different campuses the company maintained in the San Francisco region.

  Security was at its highest. Every one of the specially invited guests had been searched twice. All representatives of the world’s news media had also been submitted to intimate contact searches. The presentation theatre had been swept for explosive devices three times before this presentation had begun.

  Outside over 1,000 armed guards roamed the campus, men hired by Mondo to ensure that anti-technology terrorists such as HFDA could not attempt to attack or disrupt this morning’s proceedings. As the executive board of the Mondo Corporation had agreed, the company needed to demonstrate aggressively its continuing commitment to cutting edge technology and research. It was important that its large institutional shareholders remain convinced that the firm would continue to bring new products to the market even in the face of escalating threats and ultimatums from determined and murderous anti-technology terrorists.

  ‘Thank you all for coming,’ Joel Cummings told his audience of stock market analysts, technology reporters and senior Mondo staff. ‘Today is a landmark day for the Mondo Corporation and for our subsidiary, Mondo Transhuman Technologies. In a few moments I will be announcing a development that will prove to be momentous for all humans on this planet. But first, I would ask you to join me in a minute’s remembrance for our founder Harrold Darerenbaum and also for Mr
Marvin Nesbit and all those who died at the Las Vegas Conference Center last month.’

  Everyone in the theatre rose and Joel Cummings hung his head.

  Darrenbaum’s assassination had finally opened up the top slot in the corporation that the founder had run for so long. But Joel Cummings’s young third wife had pleaded with her husband not to take the opportunity when it had been offered.

  ‘They’ll get you, just like they got Darrenbaum,’ she had warned him. ‘The Humans First people are madmen!’

  But Cummings had been unable to resist taking the job; the opportunity, the salary and the stock options were far too great to resist. Now he was thoroughly enjoying leading the most successful group of technology companies the planet had ever seen.

  ‘Thank you,’ he told the audience and they resumed their seats.

  Walking to a clear-glass lectern, he mentally ordered the first image of his presentation onto a pair of large screens placed on either side of the stage. A picture of a small, square computer processor appeared.

  ‘This is the new Mondo Trans One bio-compatible nanoprocessor, magnified ten thousand times,’ he told his knowledgeable audience as his VA scrolled the script up in his mind. ‘It is a subquantum, optical-neural processor capable of executing two billion teraflops a second. That is ten times faster than the current world record for nanoprocessor operations.’

  Some of the Mondo staff within the audience started clapping on cue and the rest of the audience joined in.

  With a thought Cummings ordered up the next image, a schematic flow chart of an electronic circuit.

  ‘In this completely new design, single light photons are generated from a coherent ensemble of rubidium atoms and sent to a second ensemble which is rendered opaque by laser pulses,’ he told his now rapt audience, pointing with a red laser to the pertinent symbols on his flow chart. ‘This ensemble catches and stores the photon and its associated transparent, and another pulse releases the binary pair, all without degrading the photon’s quantum processing abilities. We call this the Zeno effect.’

  The audience was now silent. A few of the engineers in the room were still gazing at the flow chart trying to understand the new concepts embodied in this breakthrough technology.

  ‘ “So what?” I can hear you thinking,’ said Cummings with a smile as the projected images changed back to show the gilt-cased chip. ‘Well, I’ll tell you what. Standing on its own, without any networking, this nanoprocessor can run inside a bio-compatible system box that is one-eighth of an inch square, which contains its own life-long power source and which needs no external cooling.’

  The transhuman technology analysts in this room would now be ahead of him. They would be guessing the purpose of such a powerful yet minute stand-alone bio-compatible processor.

  ‘What is more,’ continued Cummings, ‘This chip has a raw processing capability equal to approximately twenty human brains.’

  He let this crude analogy hang in the air. His communications consultants had debated whether it was worth making such an emotive, egregiously anthropomorphic comparison, but all had agreed that the media value of such a soundbite was enormous.

  The audience seemed suitably awed. Now for the climax.

  With a change of tone, businessman becoming showman, Joel Cummings stepped back from the lectern and raised his left arm. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Nobel prize-winner for literature, America’s most treasured and most awarded author, Henry James Lampton!’

  A spotlight lit the wings and then the cameras picked up the features of the world-famous philosopher and novelist, an image which was enlarged on both screens.

  The audience clapped spontaneously and enthusiastically. The slight, thin man with a halo of distinguished-looking white hair, waved as he walked to centre stage and shook hands with the Mondo CEO. The author appeared to be at least eighty years of age.

  The men paused in their handshake and beamed at the cameras much as if they were world leaders extending the rictus of their greetings for the sake of posterity. The applause continued as they did so.

  When the flash guns had finished firing and the audience had stopped clapping, Cummings placed his hand on the elderly writer’s shoulder and steered him to a seat behind a black-velvet-draped table.

  ‘In a few moments we’ll be hearing from Mr Lampton himself, but first I want to tell you why such an eminent author is with us today.’

  A spotlight lit a clear-glass stand stage left on top of which was a clear plastic box. Inside the box glinted a minute white casing. Cummings walked over to the pediment. A camera focussed on the plastic box and an enlarged image of the tiny computer system appeared on the screens.

  ‘Inside this outer casing is one of the first production models of the Mondo Trans One nanoprocessor,’ the CEO told his audience. ‘It is intended as a repository and processor engine for the human mind.’

  There was now absolute silence in the room.

  ‘As you will know, it was our intention that the author and transhumanist pioneer Marvin Nesbit would become the first person in the world to upload a copy of his mind into a cognitive nanoprocessor – this cognitive processor.’ Cummings reached out and placed his hand on the case containing the miniscule chip.

  ‘We had received special dispensation from the Department of Health to carry out this procedure but, after Mr Nesbitt was cruelly murdered along with so many others in Las Vegas, we considered abandoning the project. Within hours, however, it became clear from the billions of searches and opinions expressed globally in the Mondomind communities that it is only the most reactionary of extremists who would seek to deny progress to our species. The human mind’s chief characteristic is a desire to grow, to expand, and we have now arrived at a point in evolution where humanity is about to extend itself beyond biology. Not beyond the moral essence of humanity, but beyond our original, physical incarnation. It is mankind’s destiny.’

  This provocative, highly charged political speech was so sensitive that the Mondo communications consultants had even run it by the Department of Homeland Security before settling on the final text. The media was full of raging debates about the terrifying threat of the deployment of weapons of mass destruction that had been issued by the Humans First Party. It was also full of discussion about the moral ethics of transhuman and post-human technologies and about the freedom to innovate which was such a core value of western, and many non-western, democracies. In the end Washington had decided that despite the risk of provoking anti-technology terrorists still further, the Mondo Corporation must be free to continue to publicize its work to the world.

  ‘Then we were contacted by Mr Lampton’s literary agent,’ Cummings told his rapt world-wide audience. ‘We learned that Mr Lampton was considering writing a new novel based on the fictional experiences of a human who had uploaded his memories and consciousness to a processor such as Trans One. We talked, and the outcome is that Mr Lampton is indeed going to write such a book, but the work will now be non-fiction and the subject of the mind to machine transfer will be his own.’

  Mondo employees led the clapping and, from behind the velvet-draped table, Henry Lampton bowed and raised a hand in acknowledgement.

  ‘The entire process will be webcast live on Mondomind and will proceed as follows,’ continued Cummings. Behind him the image of the nanoprocessor changed to show a video of a large medical scanner in operation. ‘Using ultra-high-resolution sub-nano-scale brain imaging we will create a full three dimensional model of Mr Lampton’s brain, including all synapses, neural pathways, chemical reservoirs and deposits. Over a three week period we will take over six thousand such three-D scans capturing the brain in all of its various states. All memories and emotional characteristics will be recorded.’

  The Mondo CEO paused, issued a mental command and flicked back to the image of the Trans One chip.

  ‘When we have captured every detail of the molecular structure of Mr Lampton’s amazing mind, the data will be u
ploaded to a Mondo Trans One two-billion-teraflop nanoprocessor. That processor will also be running attenuated virtual simulations of all human biological sensory inputs – sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch – even a version of the so-called sixth sense, or instinct. The mind that emerges within the processing space of this nanoprocessor will find all of the sensory feedback it would expect from a brain seated within a biological human body. For output, the mind inside Trans One will use speech and written language only. In the first instance, no form of independent physical movement or mobility will be provided.’

  There was now such a deep silence within the room that Cummings became aware of his own breathing and of his VA’s alert presence within his mind. With a glance behind him at the famous author who had volunteered to be the guinea pig for this pioneering experiment, the Mondo CEO left the pediment supporting the minute nanoprocessor and walked to the centre of the stage.