This Eden

by Ed O’Loughlin

  That doesn’t surprise me. They were probably bringing more of Fess’s laundered cash from London.

  Aoife became aware of the fascinated look on Michael’s face, watching her from across the table. He hasn’t seen me looking this angry before, she thought.

  You didn’t tell me that Fess was connected to the London thing, Towse. You told me when I joined you that you were getting me away from that.

  Jeez. I’d have told you, if you’d asked. I just assumed you’d already figured it out for yourself. It’s a no-brainer. Funny money to Africa. Fess.

  Aoife looked at her hands for a while. Then she picked up the camera, activated the LED screen, jabbed it towards Towse’s face.

  Look at these pictures. Then tell me what you see.

  She scrolled through the images. Towse looked at them, unblinking.

  A waiter appeared, stood over them.

  You should try the fried pork, Towse said. It’s pretty good. And ask for the Irish potatoes. That means potatoes. If you ask for just potatoes, they give you sweet potatoes.

  When the waiter was gone, Aoife put the camera on the table.

  Did you know they were strangling children, Towse?

  RRL.

  What?

  RRL, on the labels of those jars. It stands for Roodeplaat Research Laboratories. Roodeplaat is in South Africa, near Pretoria. Fess must have got his hands on Project Coast.

  What the hell is Project Coast?

  It was apartheid’s covert chemical and biological warfare programme. Its most secret component was under development at Roodeplaat. It was a scheme to make sure that white South Africans would become the majority, instead of the blacks. They were looking for an agent that would sterilise black people, but leave white people fertile. They were going to mix it in with the township water supplies, or slip it into vaccines. But apartheid collapsed before they got it to work. All the files and samples disappeared. Until now. Fess must be trying to reboot it.

  You sound like a conspiracy nut. An anti-vaxxer.

  On the contrary, Aoife. The anti-vaxxers are part of this too. Who do you think stands to gain if regular people stop protecting their kids?

  Why don’t you tell us who?

  People like Fess, Aoife. People who think that regular people with ordinary lives are a species of virus. People who blame the state of the world on overpopulation, instead of stupidity and greed.

  You’re saying Fess is trying to wipe out his own species, and he’s doing it here in Uganda?

  No. He’s trying to wipe out most of his own species. To save the world for people like him, until they can figure out a way to not be people anymore, to turn themselves into machines, or immortals, or whatever. And Fess isn’t working alone. There’s a bunch of them, trying their luck with a whole bunch of projects. And it’s not just the stuff that you’ve heard about – spaceships and floating cities and private islands and the rest of it. They have other things too. New viruses. Chemical agents. OmniCent. But Project Coast is one of Fess’s particular babies. Experimenting on people and apes.

  Aoife stared at him, running the combinations.

  You already knew what Fess was doing in Uganda, she said.

  I suspected. But I needed confirmation. And I needed you to see it too.

  Why?

  So you’d know how ruthless they are. So you’d know for sure that there’s no easy way out of this. Because I want you to stay with me. Because I need your help.

  Why?

  Towse stubbed out his cigarette, pulled his chair forward, right up to the edge of the table. His two hands, placed on either side of his beer glass, were the hands of a pianist, ready to play.

  It all comes down to OmniCent. It’s about who’s really in charge of it. Fess thinks that it’s him and his friends. And I know that it’s not.

  The waiter came back with their food and their beers. They had to wait until he was gone.

  What are you talking about, Towse? Fess has the lead on OmniCent. It’s not a secret. Everyone knows that.

  I didn’t tell you before what I’m about to tell you now, because you wouldn’t have believed me. But there was something I saw when I ran my diagnostics on Fess’s dark pool, back in the US. Alice had seen it too, or at least caught a glimpse of it. But even Fess doesn’t know about it.

  I don’t care about your dark pool, Towse. Why should I listen to you, after you sent us blind into that laboratory? We could have been killed.

  Towse carried on, ignoring Aoife.

  At first, I only saw what I’d expected to see. The dark pool’s regular clients, there to be fleeced, and the usual high-frequency trading bots, taking a skim on their trades. And beneath them were the even faster bots that Fess was using to rig his own casino. Again, what I expected.

  Who are you, Towse?

  But, barely visible, down in the depths, there was something impossible. Something that traded so quickly that it looked like it wasn’t moving at all.

  Who do you really work for?

  And I was right. It wasn’t moving. Its trades were instantaneous.

  Aoife gave up.

  What does that mean, Towse?

  Deep down in the dark pool, the money is trading with itself. It’s going where it wants to.

  I said, what does that mean?

  He laced his fingers together and laid his hands on the table, looking down at them as if in prayer.

  It means the money is alive.

  The Karamojong people of eastern Uganda believed, before the missionaries got to them, that God had given them all the cattle in the world. So when they rustled from neighbouring peoples, as they religiously did, it didn’t count as stealing. They were taking back what was already theirs.

  Who spoke to the Karamojong, in their centuries of wandering, after their ancestors trekked out of Ethiopia, driving their cows into the Turkana, then onward across the Rift Valley, up over its rim, into the region that we now call Uganda? Who told the Karamojong that the world’s cattle, which they worshipped then as we now worship money, were their birthright alone?

  Was this that voice’s only dispensation, or has it cut deals with other people since? Has it refined that idea? Who told Fess and his friends that they should own all the wealth in the world?

  Who indeed? We’ll get to that in a minute. For now, let us only say this: the Karamojong got off lightly when they were merely cursed with cattle.

  Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is a fungus that infects carpenter ants in tropical forests. Its spores burrow into the nervous system of a healthy ant and turn it into a zombie, forcing it to wander away from its colony, to the humid forest-floor environments where the fungus can thrive. There, the fungus forces the ant to bite into a leaf vein and hang by its mandibles, while the fungus eats it alive. When the ant is dead, an obscene fruiting body, a glistening tube, longer than the ant itself, grows from its head, swells, lengthens and bursts, spurting a cloud of infective spores.

  Ants are primitive creatures, of course, with simple nervous systems. Not like us mammals.

  Toxoplasma gondii is a single-cell organism that can reproduce sexually only in felines. But it can multiply asexually in most other mammals and birds, spreading itself in their food or water, or by sexual contact, or from mother to infant. When rodents are infected they lose their innate fear of cats. The cats eat the rodents. Toxoplasma wins.

  Approximately two billion people around the world are infected with Toxoplasma gondii. It usually goes unnoticed, but is statistically associated with increased aggression, selfishness, jealousy, and auto-destructive behaviour. There is a high incidence in people who describe themselves as entrepreneurs and risk takers, and in drivers involved in fatal crashes.

  Most people contract Toxoplasma gondii from contact with cats or their faeces. But French scientists demonstrated in the 1960s that it could
also be spread to humans in food. The scientists determined this by feeding portions of undercooked meat to their test subjects. Their test subjects were orphans in a Paris home. We don’t know if the scientists ever tested themselves for Toxoplasma gondii.

  Microscopic organisms in the human gut produce neurotransmitters that can modify human emotions, make people feel depressed, or happy, or hungry, or gregarious. They speed us up and slow us down, direct our footsteps, make us crave certain foods that the organisms favour. Are they hitchers or hijackers? Who’s in control?

  In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, after the link to the human immunodeficiency virus was shown, it was assumed that if you had HIV it would kill you. Then, as time passed and many infected people survived, a new realisation took hold. You could live indefinitely with HIV, so long as you suppressed the degree of infection, lived as healthily as possible, took retroviral drugs. HIV was only lethal when the virus was present in sufficient numbers to swarm the immune system, overrun its defences, batter holes in cell walls to let in other afflictions. Patients with low viral loads were not only healthier themselves, but also much less infectious to others.

  The more of the virus you had, the more lethal it was, to you and to others.

  A virus is a genetic package in a protein envelope. It doesn’t eat or grow or move, and can only reproduce by tricking a host into copying its genes. Genes are information, encoded as strings of DNA or RNA. A virus exists only to replicate this information. A virus, Towse told Aoife and Michael that night in Gulu, whether computer, organic, or meme, is really just an unhealthy idea.

  *

  Waiters loitered on the edge of the terrace, noisily stacking the chairs. The music and dancers were gone. The coloured lights, strung on poles above the dance floor, had been disconnected. Flames guttered in the unlit market, itinerant traders cooking a meal before settling down for the night.

  Towse, having mesmerised Aoife and Michael with his set-ups and feints, his flickering vistas, had revealed his prestige. When he opened his hands, looking up at his companions, Aoife half-expected them to release a dove.

  So that’s what Alice saw in the dark pool. The money’s alive. It’s a new kind of organism. A global online virus. A multi-cellular meme.

  That’s insane.

  It’s the conclusion that fits the observed phenomena.

  Michael spoke up:

  Assuming it’s alive, is it sentient?

  Define ‘sentient’.

  Does it know what it wants?

  It wants to be with other money. And to propagate itself. So it infects vulnerable hosts, and drives them away from the rest of humanity. The more money they have, the sicker they get. At an advanced stage of infection, they no longer behave like humans at all. It makes them think that they’re gods. And they start shedding money, through their lawyers and politicians and journalists, to poison herd resistance. The money is used to persuade people that nothing matters, nothing is real, things have to be the way that they are, that money is the only real power and that you can’t do anything about it. If you have a problem in your life, blame it on blacks or women or Muslims or gays or whoever. Never the money.

  If you’re right, said Aoife, and you can’t be, how would something like this evolve?

  I’m not sure. But think about this: what if a non-human super intelligence already existed, but it was too smart to show itself? What if it was manifesting itself as money, to soften us up, until it was ready to destroy us by some other means, like a war, or a famine, or a virus? Or even a meme?

  Neither Aoife nor Michael could speak. Towse was proud of being a liar, but that didn’t mean they could trust him to be lying now.

  You’re saying our machines could be doing this?

  That’s the most likely hypothesis. I did some simulations, ran lots of projections. There was only one other possibility that really leaped out at me, though it was kind of remote. My Raëlian friends got me thinking . . . What if money is some kind of alien probe?

  Aliens?

  No, really, Aoife. Aliens. What if these aliens are looking for new planets to colonise, so they send a cloud of memetic ideation on ahead of them, at light speed or faster, while they follow more slowly in colony ships? By the time their ships get here, their terraforming device, which is money, will have altered the planet to make it suitable for them. Judging from what we’re seeing with climate change, they would probably be reptilian. They want a world that is hot and humid and mostly underwater.

  The Drowned World, said Michael. Now I get it. You put those books in my house at Palo Alto.

  I got Aoife to do it. I was trying to loosen you up. You’re so fucking uptight, Michael. Alice was right about you.

  Never mind that, said Aoife. The great thing about your stories, Towse, is there’s never any way to prove or disprove them.

  You’re wrong, Aoife. There’s one sure way to find out if something is alive or not.

  And what’s that, Towse?

  I’m going to try to kill it, then see what it does.

  Towse had only taken two rooms in the hotel. One was for him, the other for Aoife and Michael. He seemed to take it for granted that, having been forced to share before, along the road, they’d continue to do so.

  Aoife could have demanded a room to herself, but she’d decided that she felt sorry for Michael. No one should have to share with Towse. There was something uncanny about him. What if you opened your eyes in the night, and he wasn’t in the room with you, and you blinked, and then he was? Compared to Towse, she and Michael belonged to a similar order of being. It almost felt like they were colleagues. He was starting to come good.

  The room had whitewashed walls and a red tile floor; it was clean, but with rust stains in the shower and sink of the small en suite bathroom. There was no glass in the window, only torn wire mesh.

  Mosquitoes bided their time on the ceiling. There was only one bed.

  Neither of them said anything. They may have been too tired to talk. Aoife took off her shoes, stood on the bed and killed all the mosquitoes she could reach with the Gideon Bible. Michael blocked the torn window mesh with a towel from the bathroom. That would have to do for now. She’d get some chloroquine tomorrow, for both of them, just in case.

  Aoife showered and then, having no luggage, got dressed again in her T-shirt and jeans. As Michael took his turn in the shower, she switched off the light and lay along one edge of the bed.

  It was the small hours now, and the market was quiet. Aoife felt Michael settling beside her, their bodies held stiffly apart, despite the gravitational pull of the saggy old mattress. She wondered if he was dressed too. She hadn’t opened her eyes when he came out of the bathroom.

  His breathing was shallow. She could smell the nicotine on her own breath. She was already sweating. At last, he spoke.

  Do you believe him?

  I don’t know.

  Everything he told us is crazy.

  So is everything that’s happened.

  We still don’t even know who he is. No matter how many times we ask, he always deflects.

  He’s like a magician. He makes you look in the wrong place.

  Michael shifted his weight, and the mattress shook. He was sweating again too. They lay in their mingled scent.

  Are we going to stay with him?

  We, Aoife noted. Since when was that the default?

  Consider the alternative, she said. He’s kept us a step ahead of Fess and Barb Collins, and whatever Feds they have on our tail. He knows how to get us out of Uganda. We don’t. So I’m going to stick with him, for now.

  Until when?

  Aoife thought about that. She assumed that Towse would keep opening one Russian doll after another, that his fan dance would never end.

  It’s too hot in this room, she said.

  She swung her legs over the side of the be
d, stood with her back to it, took off her jeans. She lay back down, restoring the original distance between them. The equatorial night, close and still, did nothing to cool her. She wanted to spread herself out to it, but there wasn’t room.

  It was a while before Michael spoke again.

  I don’t know why Towse wants me. I know what you do for him.

  And what’s that?

  Lots of things . . . For one thing, you got me into this.

  Was he talking about that? The summer dress she’d worn the day she first approached him, the tailored uniform, cut to look good? The way that she’d ruthlessly negged him at first, a trick that worked better on men than on women? How far did he think all those ploys really went?

  She had slept with colleagues a couple of times, on the road, and one or two strangers, as physical facts, fellow travellers, interchangeable. But Michael was a mark, not a colleague or a stranger. She’d always felt sorry for the marks that she followed, whose houses she bugged and whose secrets she stole. To do these jobs properly, she had to predict their likely movements, which meant she had to consider their motives, to understand them as people, to rehearse their roles. This was one of the ways that the job had destroyed her. And Towse had only made things worse: he hadn’t told her about Alice when he sent her to lure Michael. This time, she hadn’t been ready for the role she was playing. It hadn’t been fair on Michael. It hadn’t been fair on her, either.

  I don’t know why Towse wants you, she said. But he must have something planned. I feel like he’s pulling strings that I don’t even know about. Everything he does is worked out in advance.

  Predetermined, said Michael.

  He shifted his weight, and the old mattress narrowed the distance between them. They both lay with their arms folded behind their heads, to stop their elbows from brushing in the middle of the bed.

  We could fight it, she said, but it seems like there’s no point.

  She closed her eyes, yawned, gasped a lungful of warm air.

  She took her arms from behind her head and stretched them in front of her, pale against the paler ceiling. Then she turned on her side and faced him.