Creations (13 page)

Max recoiled from the outburst, unable to think of a reply. This wasn’t the calm, reasonable Safi he’d worked alongside for the past three months. If anyone was going to react badly he could have been sure it wouldn’t be her. The stress of the
situation must have been getting to her more than he’d thought. He sat back, wordless.

Mayaan however was not so easily silenced. Along with the rest of the room he’d been watching the exchange almost in disbelief and now took advantage of the pause to turn on Safi.

“You knew about this?” he said. “You’ve been talking about this between yourselves for weeks, and you didn’t think to ask how it affected us?”

“Hey, this is news to me too,” Safi said, raising her hands in defence. “Talk to Max if it’s a problem.”

“Too right it’s a problem,” Mayaan said. “Do you know how much of our work is wasted if we do what he wants? How much extra work we’ll need to do?”

“So what are we talking about here?” Victor said, stepping in. “If we wanted to design it Max’s way, what would that involve?”

“It can’t be done using the low grade electronics we’re using so far,” Safi said. “We’d need something way more sophisticated, a whole order of magnitude better.”

“That can’t be difficult, surely.”

“It is if these things are going to replicate. They need to be able to make everything they’re made from. You can’t put a high-grade processor in the design unless it can make one when it replicates, and that isn’t easy.”

Victor walked over to the far wall where the preliminary designs were displayed. They’d started off as neat, tidy graphics, but were now covered in two weeks’ worth of alterations and amendments, with even older versions saved beneath them for later retrieval. Hitting the CAD board’s backup function was like digging back through geological history. In the middle of the display were two long lists: the parts list showing everything that was needed to build a Prospector, and the products list showing everything a Prospector could make, given seawater and sunlight. Everything on list A had to be on list B, with no exceptions.

“How are these processors normally made? Can’t we use the same method?”

Safi shook her head. “Think of how high grade chips are manufactured — clean room facilities, silicon purification plants — but even if we could make a chip builder small enough, the Prospector couldn’t make one for itself, so we wouldn’t have achieved anything. If we can’t get one hundred percent closure we might as well give up now.”

Mayaan stood up again and looked round the room. “So why bother with this at all?” he said. “Why not just ignore Max and build it the way we want to build it? We know it’ll work, so why make it more difficult for ourselves, just because he says so?”

Max was ready for this. “You’re right, I can’t force you to do it my way, but as Victor said when he first explained the plan to us all, I was brought in for a reason. I know what can happen if exponential systems are inadequately constrained. You need to trust me on this one.”

Again, the silence was broken by Victor.

“Safi, any thoughts?”

She threw her hands up into the air and shook her head. “What can I say that I haven’t said already? We’ve got enough problems as it is building these things, and then this comes along. As if a high-grade navigation system is something you can just bolt on as an afterthought. It’s ridiculous.”

“But if we assume that Max is right, and we need one, then we need to find some way of making it. What are our options?”

“Okay, the electronics we’re using now would have been state of the art in the nineteen-fifties, but they’re good enough for the job and they’re easy to build, relatively. But now we’re talking about something way more ambitious. We’d need a whole new set of production systems, more complex than anything else on board, just for this one part of the design. And somehow the manufacturing plant has to be able to make all those things for replication. I have to hand it to you, Max, you know how to make
life complicated.”

By this point in the discussion no eye contact was taking place. People were just staring into their own private bits of space, speaking in turn. Max looked briefly to where Isaac was sitting, near the back of the room keeping out of the discussion just as Max had promised he could.

“So what do you suggest?” Victor said.

Safi paused. “I didn’t want to have to say this,” she said eventually. “But if we decide we need high grade processors, we may have to supply them as vitamin parts.”

“What does that mean?” Ross said.

“It means we make them here on the island, and hand them over to each Prospector as it replicates. That way it doesn’t need to make them for itself.”

Victor was shaking his head. “No, we can’t even consider that. It would completely destroy the economics of the thing. Full replication is the only way to make this worthwhile.”

“Then I guess we’re stuck,” Safi said.

This time Oliver was the next to speak.

“I hate to say I told you so,” he said. “But I seem to remember warning you all that this would happen.”

“Did you now?” Ross said without looking up.

“On the very first day, do you remember what I said? That a machine can only make something simpler than itself? That machines reproducing themselves is science fiction? If you’d listened to me back then we would all have saved a lot of time and effort.”

“That didn’t stop you hanging around to collect your paycheques though, did it?” Ross said.

“Now you listen here!” Oliver snapped. “I’ve stuck it out through this charade for long enough! I knew right at the start it wasn’t possible, so don’t blame me because it’s taken you this long to work it out for yourselves!”

“Enough!” Victor said. It was the first time any of them had
heard him raise his voice. “You four, in my office now.”

Safi, Ross, Max and Oliver left the meeting room and followed Victor down the corridor. They walked quickly and in silence. Once inside, they stood there uneasily while he shut the door and turned to face them.

“How are we going to achieve anything through a performance like that?” he said.

None of them answered.

“We’ve got more important things to worry about than you people arguing among yourselves. Now, we’re going to go back into that room, and we’re going to settle this properly. I will not see this program fail just because you can’t agree on what we need to do.”

“If you ask me, it’s failed already,” Oliver said, “and I’ve said that right from the start.”

“Yes,” Ross said, “and we’ve proved you wrong every time.”

“Proved me wrong? What was that little discussion all about if it wasn’t you lot realising this can’t be done? You can dress it up with words like ‘closure problems’ and ‘throughput deficiencies’, but you’re the ones who’ve been proved wrong!”

Victor rounded on him. “Oliver, what we’re trying to do is not impossible, and we’ve shown that, many times. It’s going to take all of us to make it happen, including you, but we
are
going to do it. Now are you with us on this?”

Oliver shook his head and walked over to the door. “I’m glad you’re so confident,” he said as he went. “Just don’t ask me for help next time you get stuck.”

“Don’t worry, we won’t,” Ross said under his breath.

As Oliver got to the door he stopped and turned to face Max. For a second he looked as if he was about to say something else, but then he turned again and left for real.

* * *

Victor decided to abandon the meeting after that. Max went straight down to where his car was parked and set off home through the rain, the events of the meeting playing over and over in his mind. Safi’s words had stung him more than anyone else’s, maybe because her reaction had been so out of character. Her calm, level-headed approach to problems was one of the things he respected in her the most, and he’d come to respect her a lot. He hoped he hadn’t done any lasting damage. Ahead of him he could occasionally see the lights of her and Ross’s cars as the winding coast road took them round the island.

Once at the house he parked up and went inside. Even running the short distance from the car to the front door got him wet and he went straight into the bathroom to dry off. It was only then that he noticed how quiet the place was. He went into the lounge, then the bedroom, then back to the lounge, looking for any sign of where Gillian might be. It was then that he saw the red LED blinking on the home terminal. The display showed a message stored there, with Gillian’s omni griddex as the sender.

“Do you know what you are Max?” she said when he set it running. She looked livid, as if barely able to control what she was saying. “You’re pathetic. That’s the only word I can think of after what you’ve done.” She’d recorded it in that very room, with the doors out to the small deck behind her. The glass showed darkness outside; whatever this was, she’d recorded it recently. “You lied to me to protect yourself, and didn’t think once that you were putting me in danger. How could you do that? How could any man do that? Some psycho gets within two feet of me, and still you keep quiet. Were you just hoping they’d never do anything? That I’d never find out? Or wouldn’t it have mattered if they’d come after me for real? Well whatever it was, don’t think you’ll get the chance to do it again. I’m not staying here, not after this. I’ll call you when I get where I’m going, but don’t try to find me. And don’t expect me to change my mind. I won’t be calling with good news.”

It was then that he saw the stack of papers, on the desk next to the terminal’s keyboard. Knowing what they’d show before he even turned them over, he picked them up and began to read.

Your sick blasphemous lies will be with you to your grave
, the first one said.
Evolution is a fraud, just as the LORD has said, and many false prophets will rise, Darwin and his monkey worshippers among them. Should this hateful idolatry continue, a well sharpened steel may find your neck at any time
.

How can you dare to mock your LORD and creator in this way?
another said.
He who made all life on this Earth, everything of beauty
,
yet your refusal to believe the evidence of your eyes has made you unfit to be part of His creation. You will end your days kneeling in sight of the LORD, you and your barren wife, begging for forgiveness and another chance
.

And finally:
You have lost, and you know it as well as I do. If you had righteousness and mercy on your side, you would be in South America even now, conducting your campaign of deceit and indoctrination. Instead you hide, cowardly and afraid. Your home is inhabited by strangers, your office empty. Is this how you show the conviction of your beliefs, hiding away like a criminal? Or is this your admission that those beliefs are flawed, that your faith in Darwin and his hateful prophecies is treasonous to everything the righteous hold sacred?

Max flicked through the papers a second time; every one he’d ever been sent was there, all of them dated and addressed, the threats to him and to Gillian, the photographs of him and Gillian, plus that final one, the one Indira had told him about but which he’d never even laid eyes on until now.

He went round the house in a daze after that. Her wardrobe was empty, everything of hers in the bathroom was gone. She’d even taken her painting materials, nothing was left. Then he went back outside and saw what he hadn’t even noticed when he’d dashed in to avoid the rain: the empty space round the corner of the house, where her car was normally parked.

He sat in the lounge, trying to force himself to think straight.
If she was going then she had two options, the long boat journey to Samoa followed by a flight from there, or the ESOS jet that had brought them down in the first place. The Samoan flights would be subject to GRACE controls, just one flight every one or even two weeks. The ESOS flights were supply runs, every two weeks at best unless a special delivery or passenger transfer was needed. That would force her to take whichever went first, and if she’d left the house already then at least one of them must be departing today. He went over to the terminal and brought up the flight schedules, and there it was: the ESOS jet, leaving that evening, flying back empty after offloading its cargo of food and supplies.

He ran back out to his car and took the coast road again, past the ESOS complex to where the airfield and its small terminal building lay. He saw the crates of supplies as soon as he got into the building; the jet was either on the ground or had already left. It was when he ran through onto the tarmac that he saw the plane had gone. He looked into the sky to see if there was any sign of it, but all he could see was the rain clouds, emptying ceaselessly onto the archipelago.

He stood like that for a full ten minutes, ignoring the curious stares of the two ground crew as they shifted the crates into a store room. Then he went back to his car and made his way home, dead on the inside.

* * *

The first thing he did when he got to the villa was to open up his omni and call Victor.

“Max, what’s going on? The airfield just called me to say Gillian had gone.”

“Yes, that’s right, she’s gone. What did they tell you?”

“Just that there was some emergency back home, something to do with her family. Is everything alright?”

So that was what she’d told them to let her fly. “No, Victor, things aren’t alright at all.”

“Max, what’s going on?”

“I need to leave, I need to go after her. Where is that plane going back to?”

“It’s going to Washington, the same as always. Why?”

“I need to go too. As quickly as possible.”

“But Max, we need you here, you said it yourself in the meeting. And why did she go on her own if you need to be there too?”

“She, ah, she’s gone without me.”

There was silence on the end of the line, probably the first realisation of what had happened. “Max,” he said eventually, “what’s going on?”

Max also paused. He couldn’t see any way out of telling the truth. “We, er, we’ve hit some problems. There was something I should have told her about but didn’t, and she’s gone.” It was uncomfortable talking to Victor about this. He was a different kind of boss to Indira; with her, Max felt he could bring up any subject he wanted. Victor on the other hand led from a more reserved position. “Please, Victor, just let me get off this island, whichever way’s fastest. I’ll try to sort this out and then I’ll be back, but you have to help me go.”