Creations (15 page)

“I’ve given up being surprised, the lengths some people will go to,” he said.

“I just can’t understand it. I don’t think I ever will. That’s not what my faith is about, or anyone in my family. Even Dad, I mean he has serious problems with what you do, there’s no point denying it, but to have this happen? He can’t understand it either.”

Max was prepared to believe that. He couldn’t see Ira being in on this; Roy must have been acting outside the family, presumably with accomplices to mail the letters and take the pictures. That was the police’s problem now. For Max though, there was still one question unanswered. “So where did you get the letters from?” he said. “Who sent them to you?”

“They came in on my omni. I didn’t recognise the address.”

“Can I see?”

She got her omni out, a broad silver-plated pendant, and
opened up the messaging page. The letters were all there as softcopy attachments, the same scans that UCLA security had made of the hardcopy originals, but the message that had delivered them to Gillian showed only “Tyrell-B UCLA” as the sender. Griddex names had to match your own name or your company name; misleading ones were seen as fraudulent, a carryover from the ground-up rebuild when the early twenty-first century internet was replaced by the worldwide grid, but Tyrell B wasn’t a name Max had even heard of. A status check showed the address was dormant, closed to incoming messages.

“I’m going to find out who that is,” Max said. “And why they did it. It’s got to be someone in the department, no one else knew about this.”

“So I wasn’t the only one left in the dark?”

“No, you weren’t.”

“You should have told me.”

“I know. If I said I was waiting for the right opportunity it would probably sound pretty lame, but I didn’t know how you’d react.”

“Max, I’m your wife, there should be nothing you’re too scared to come to me with.”

“Even this? I know you don’t approve of the school visits, the talks I give. How would you react if I said out of the blue that people were threatening us both as a result?”

“You’re right, I don’t approve of what you do. I think you’re force-feeding children a flawed and overly simplistic answer to probably the most compelling questions human beings can ever ask. You’re teaching them to see the world the way you do: one life, once we die that’s it, no consequences, no higher power, no nothing. I still can’t understand how someone can live a moral life that way, and I don’t think I ever will. But I married you for a reason, despite what my family thought: there’s more to you than just your beliefs. You’re a wonderful man, everything I could have asked for, kind, compassionate, honest, or so I thought.
That’s why this hurt me so much. If you can be dishonest over something this important, what else have I got wrong about you?”

There was little for Max to argue with. “It was a mistake,” he said. “I won’t let you down again.”

“I hope you don’t.”

“Does this mean you’re going to come back?”

Just for a second, she seemed to consider her answer. “Yes, I’ll come back.”

Max felt as if a weight he’d carried for days was suddenly gone. “Thank you,” he said, taking her hand. She didn’t resist.

“But we’re going to be honest from now on,” she said. “No secrets, no sneaking around.”

“Sure.”

“Not even the stuff you’re doing out there. I don’t want to be kept in the dark on anything. I want to feel trusted, no matter what Victor has told you.”

“So you want to know what it’s all about?”

“Yes.”

He’d been sworn to secrecy, but in the circumstances he felt she deserved the truth. So he told her, the whole gold extraction plan, the replicators, everything, including his reservations about the Prospectors and the argument the day she walked out.

“Is that why you were reluctant to go? When you were first offered the place?”

“Yes. I think it’s a bad idea, and I can only see it ending badly.”

“It sounds to me like they’re trying to create something alive. That’s just wrong. No one has the right do that.”

“That’s pretty much what I’ve thought all along.”

“Really? You really see it like that?”

“Yes, but not for the same reasons as you. It’s the physical consequences I’m worried about, not the blasphemy.”

“So what are you going to do? If you’ve got to stick with a
project you don’t agree with, where does that leave you?”

He hesitated, thinking through the situation again in his head. His was a scientist’s viewpoint, everything was a problem to be solved, a broken thing to be fixed. The navigation system, that was it. He could see the dilemma in his mind, just as clearly as he had back on the island. How to get a robust, reliable navigation computer into something simple enough to be made from algal cellulose and filtered sediment.

He stared at the picture opposite, of the golden butterfly spreading its wings in the sun.
Nymphalidae Vannevaris
, he thought, its name choosing that moment to come to mind. But still something about the picture was nagging at him.

“Somewhere there’s an answer,” he said. “Somewhere there’s an answer.”

* * *

When Max called the island to say he’d be coming back, he found out he wasn’t the only one with news.

Oliver’s departure was a shock, but not really a surprise. He had left a few days after Max and Gillian, the aftermath of that day’s arguments never really having been put behind him. No one on the project planned to see him again. They didn’t see any point, and they didn’t think Oliver would either.

“All he ever did was gloat when things went wrong,” Ross said from his side of the video link. “Why should we give him a send off? I’m glad to see the back of him.”

“It was a mistake bringing him out here,” Victor admitted. “I should have known he was here for the wrong reasons.”

And once Max had heard those reasons, he had to agree. The way Oliver had used his position in his previous job to abuse and then fire anyone who tried to argue with him, the way he’d then lost that job after a protracted disciplinary battle, and the way this project must have looked like his salvation: a chance to
rebuild his career as well as his finances. Suddenly it made sense why he’d stayed so long in a job he thought was a waste of time. And suddenly the stories of near-mutinies in his backroom team weren’t so hard to believe either. He’d be a hard enough person to work for even if he didn’t think the whole thing was pointless.

“This doesn’t solve our real problems though,” Victor said. “Just because we don’t have him around anymore, that doesn’t alter the fact that we’re in trouble.”

In a previous age she would have been called a journalist. Not a famous name on the newsfeeds, not a face to be recognised from the broadcasts, but a vital part of the gathering process, her far-reaching electronic presence filtering and collating anything which might be of value. Times, however, had changed. For Anna Liu and her organisation, feeding stories to the news channels was now only part of the job. Contract information gathering was the best description for her profession, and these days the job she did, and the techniques at her disposal, had more in common with espionage than journalism. As an investigator for one of the premier international information agencies, she was often required to spend hours sifting through the real time data that came in from her sources around the world, and the twenty-four hour nature of the job had long since made its mark on her life. But the rewards made it worthwhile.

She only knew him as “Tyrell”. Three weeks ago he’d started sending her information from within the ESOS company, all low value data, but the kind of internal documents and communications that only an insider would have access to. The staff headcounts and departmental management plans were just a taster though, the proof that something more valuable could be provided if the price could be agreed. Three times she’d gone back to him with an offer, and three times he’d held firm, waiting for her to offer more. And then, for some reason, his messages had stopped.

She knew there was something good there, some new project or breakthrough. Her gut feeling was that something big was going on in ESOS, a kind of feeling she’d long since learned to trust. If Tyrell had gone quiet, she would need another lead.

It was half past two in the morning when the flag came in alerting her to a tip-off from one of her trawlers. Informants
aside, the trawlers were her most profitable data sources: artificial intelligence programs trained to hunt through government and company press releases, open source publications and existing news material, looking for any connections or inconsistencies that might be of value. They also tapped into the global “grey market” of information: which national grids someone’s omni account had hooked up to, whose messages certain keywords had appeared in: far from legal, but far from traceable too. But although the trawlers were useful, they would never learn intuition. That particular gift was hers alone.

Three names were listed at the top of the terse, computer generated statement when it arrived; Safi Biehn, Max Lowrie, and Oliver Rudd. None of them sounded familiar to her, and a quick glance at their résumés showed nothing to link them either. The first, a regional cargo pilot from Florida who seven years ago had abandoned a promising career in lunar surface engineering; the second, an English biologist living in California, making a tidy living out of “Darwinian design”, whatever that was; and the third, a professor of robotics with a string of qualifications and a talent for getting himself fired. Obviously they had something in common that was more than just coincidence. Intrigued, she read further.

Then she saw it. Not only had they all stayed in Washington DC over the same week five months ago, the two that weren’t already unemployed had both left their jobs very soon afterward.

Private addresses were harder to get hold of, even for the trawlers, but she could see that all three of them had left their previous residences in order to take up their new positions. There was, however, no indication whatsoever of them moving into new ones. It was as if they’d simply disappeared.

Somewhere, deep down, she knew the ESOS story was linked. And she wanted to know how.

* * *

It was the day before he and Gillian were due to fly back to the island that Max realised he had the answer. It solved everything — the Prospector design, the control system, the safety measures — and what was more, it had been staring him in the face just days before. All he had to do now was convince the others.

“Victor, how would you like a trip to Colorado?”

“Colorado? What are you talking about Max?”

“I want you to meet someone I worked with a few years ago. His name is Doug Chowdry, and I think he may be able to help us.”

“How? What does he do?”

“I can’t explain it here, you’d have to see for yourself.”

“Are you talking about getting him down to the island?”

“No, we’d have to go to him. All of us, in fact. I can get there from West Virginia easily enough, you’ll need to get there however you can. But once you’ve seen the kind of work he does, you’ll understand.”

“Max, I can’t take everyone halfway round the world just on a whim. You’re going to have to tell me more.”

“No, Victor, you got us all the way to Washington before you told us why we were there, now it’s my turn to keep you guessing. But trust me, you’ll know what I’m thinking of soon enough.”

* * *

They’d arranged to meet in the lobby of Artemis Technologies, in an industrial unit on the outskirts of Colorado Springs. It was the first time Max had met the others in nine days. In true ESOS style they’d flown all the way, even the continental leg, but Max and Gillian had rented a two-seat Z-Vec, tearing along the interstate channel at over two hundred miles an hour, in a convoy of eighty close-coupled vehicles. Once on the slow roads he selected the Zip code for the centre of the city, then dropped Gillian off at the
hotel Victor had arranged for them all before joining another automated traffic stream out toward the Air Force college.

The Artemis building was just beyond the college, with a lineup of aviation relics flanking the road outside, static displays of F-15s and F-18s mounted on concrete pillars, plus a recently retired Boeing U-155, battered and scorched from its lifetime of excursions in and out of the atmosphere. Max’s father had spent most of his working life shaving gram after gram from the spacecraft science payloads he’d designed, never once knowing that these then-classified planes were running halfway to orbit and back as if it was a day-trip. Max sat in the reception area and looked it over while he waited for the others to turn up.

“Max, good to see you again,” Victor said when he arrived with Safi and Ross. “Everything alright?”

“I’m okay,” he said. “Ready to get back to work.”

“So you’re back on the project now?” Safi said. She was back in her meeting attire, the same plain suit she’d worn when he first met her.

“Absolutely.” Max didn’t know how much she and Ross had been told about why he’d had to leave, but he hoped he’d get the chance to explain it his way. Keeping secrets would have to become a habit of the past, and that included colleagues.

Once they’d booked in they were led to the second floor, to a room looking out over the Rocky Mountains. They took their seats and waited for their host to arrive.

Doug Chowdry was slightly younger than Max, with reddish coloured hair and red checked shirt. He recognised Max straight away when he entered the room, but he still did a double take when he saw the four of them sitting there. After three months on the island their heavily tanned skin and weather-beaten faces must have made them look like survivors from a shipwreck.

Once they’d been introduced, Doug turned to Max expectantly. “Well, this is your show I guess, Max. So what can I do for you?”

Max’s answer was meant for all of them.

“I’ve deliberately kept everyone in the dark on this one,” he said, “because I don’t want to prejudice any of the decisions we may end up making. You’ve probably guessed that Doug here has access to some technology that could help us in our program, and Doug, you’ve probably guessed that we could find a use for what you do. But I think it should speak for itself, so, I’ll let you take over.”