Creations (2 page)

“If you want to, yes. Go ahead.”

Max hadn’t known what to expect of this man who had so successfully orchestrated his trip across the country without even once showing himself in person. Victor was a lot shorter than Max, definitely in his mid fifties, with thinning grey hair and filled-out waist. His eyes were his most prominent feature, piercing blue eyes set into a pale round face. ESOS was a Swiss company but despite his name, Victor’s accent was almost as English as Max’s own.

“I see you’ve met Safi here. Can I introduce you to Ross? This is Ross Whelan from our materials department.”

Ross was a New Zealander, Max could tell once they’d made their greetings, and must have been the youngest one in the room, mid-twenties by the look of him, easy going, tanned and casually dressed. He reminded Max of himself ten years previously, when a relaxed attitude to appearances in the workplace was a deliberate show of being gifted enough to get away with it.

“We’re only waiting for one more,” Victor said. “Shall we sit down?”

They found themselves places round the central table, Victor at the top, a large wall-mounted screen behind him, and everyone else down the sides. They each had a small screen set into the table in front of them, a never-ending loop of corporate video clips and animated logos, brand reinforcement raised to saturation levels.

Victor touched a few controls and brought the room lights down, leaving them with small reading lights and the glow of their screens. The door swung shut, its access latch clicking into place.

“I think we ought to make a start,” he said. “I’m sure our missing colleague will join us as soon as he can. Well, Safi and Max, if I can start by thanking you both for turning up so promptly. I understand you must feel a bit messed around with
all this cloak-and-dagger act, but as I’ve said, you won’t be kept in the dark for much longer.”

Max had heard that more than once as he’d prepared for this trip, trying to glean even the most fragmentary information from ESOS to see whether their confidence in him was as justified as they seemed to think. Every attempt had been met with the same promise though: wait and see, we picked you for a reason.

Victor continued, “Ross here, as you’ll find out later, has already been with us in Marine Extraction for, what? Five months now?”

“Going on six,” Ross said.

“Six months, yes. Long enough to become probably one of the world’s leading experts on the particular exam question we’ve set ourselves this past year. Though none of us could claim to be
the
leading authority, of course.” He looked over to Safi as he said that, a meaningful smile on his face as if teasing out the mystery of their invitation as far as he possibly could. She looked at him quizzically in return.

“If we want to get the formal introductions out of the way first, my name is Victor Rioux and I head the Marine Extraction division of ESOS. This division has sixteen offices, in four different countries, run jointly from Zurich and here in Washington. Our main business is offshore mining, but lately we’ve been looking into marine chemical extraction techniques, something you’ll hear more about later. Max, do you want to tell us a bit about yourself?”

“Okay, I’m Max Lowrie, and I work in the evolutionary studies department at UCLA. Most of my work concerns the use of simulated evolution as an engineering design tool, but I’m also a biological researcher with a place on the GRACE programme.”

“And you’re the Cambria man,” Ross said with a grin.

Max looked over at Ross, surprised to hear that name mentioned out of the blue. “And I’m the Cambria man, yes.”

It wasn’t something he liked being reminded of, even though
most people couldn’t see why he regarded it as a failure. It had seemed so simple at first: take the same simulated evolution code he worked with every day, then run it endlessly, with no design goal in mind other than that the things it produced should survive to the next generation. But the things it had led to, albeit contained in that little virtual world: to call it carnage wouldn’t even begin to describe it.

They carried on round the table.

“I’m Safi Biehn, and I used to work as an engineer for a major research corporation based out of Florida.” She was softly spoken, but her words were clear and deliberate. “Most of my work was into advanced manufacturing techniques and production systems. Since then I’ve been working as a commercial pilot.”

Victor had a wry smile on his face. “Okay, Safi, I think you’re holding back a bit on your real achievements there, but let’s carry on. Ross, do you want to go next?”

“Okay, hi everyone, I’m Ross Whelan. Oceanography is what I do, what I’m trained in, marine chemistry and that kind of thing. I was at the University of Hawaii before I came here, and I work with the kind of extraction techniques Victor here mentioned earlier. But that’s probably all he’ll let me say on the subject, so I don’t give his little game away, is that right Victor?” He looked over at Victor and grinned, and got a smile in return. “So that’s me basically. Any more you want to know, just ask.”

Ross had hardly finished speaking when the door opened and the final attendee walked in, a tall heavy set man with thick black hair and an air of imposing gravity that would have drawn all eyes to him even if he hadn’t just turned up late. He smiled round at the room in general as he strode in, while Jane Glenday stood behind him making apologetic faces at Victor. Then he walked over to the table, choosing the first seat he came to even though it was at the far end from the others, before looking round at each of them in turn. The last person his eyes fell on was
Ross, who he looked up and down a couple of times before saying, “Dressed for the beach are we?” and smiling at the rest of them as if expecting a laugh in return. Ross sat back heavily in his chair and looked to Victor, seemingly unsure how to react and looking to his boss for guidance.

Victor turned to the door, thanked Jane, and hit the control to swing it shut. Then he turned to face the newcomer. “Professor Rudd?” he said.

“That’s right. You’re Rioux, I’m guessing?”

“Victor Rioux, yes, thank you for joining us. We were just going round doing the introductions.”

He indicated for the newcomer to speak, but he didn’t take the invitation. In the end, Victor spoke for him.

“This is Oliver Rudd from London, England. He’s a professor of mechanical engineering, and he works in robotics and cybernetics. He’s acted as a consultant to some of the world’s largest manufacturing companies, and sits on the boards of two major professional bodies. Do you want to add anything to that?”

“If I knew what I was even doing here, I might be able to answer that,” he said, smiling again as if the wit of the reply should have been lost on none of them.

The others then had to go round and introduce themselves again, something that Ross looked less than impressed about — and Safi too, though as far as Max could tell she was doing her best to hide it. That was interesting, he thought, her attitude to lateness. In fact everything about her suggested an uncompromising attitude to organisation: her clothing, a simple light coloured suit with not even a sign of a crease, the way she spoke, articulate but never wasteful of words. She wore no make-up, and her hair was cut simply, hanging straight down over her shoulders. Attractive she certainly was, but exploiting that fact seemed to be a low priority for her.

Once the introductions were finished they managed to move on. “In front of you, on your screens, you’ll see a standard
commercial confidentiality agreement,” Victor said. “You may have come across forms like this before, but I want you to study it carefully because you each need to sign one before we can go any further. If any of you object, then I’m afraid you can’t stay any longer than this part of the presentation.”

“Is this ratified?” Max said.

“Yes,” Victor said. “All our confidentiality measures adhere to the Turin Protocol.”

“And if we sign this form of yours, but don’t like the sound of what you tell us later? What then?”

“The agreement is binding, whatever you decide. Once you’ve signed this form you’ll be trusted with some very sensitive information, and you’ll be held liable if that information is passed to the wrong people. Beyond that, you’re under no obligations at all.”

The agreement was a standard one; Max had signed others like it countless times before when various companies, all with their own sets of secrets, had wanted to hire out his skills. He read it from end to end, checking for any surprises, then picked up the pointer and signed the box on the screen.

Victor waited until all their signatures were confirmed, then brought up the first video clip of his presentation. It flashed into view behind him, and on the small screens in front of them. “Right,” he said with a smile. “Let’s get started.”

The scene was a grim one. Like an open-cast wound in the planet’s crust, a vista of spoil heaps and automated ore-decks filled the screen, barely visible through the haze of smoke and dust kicked up by an endless procession of dumper trucks.

“Think about this,” Victor said, getting to his feet and taking a position beneath the main display. “All the gold ever mined out of the ground, in the whole of human history, would fit into a cube eighteen metres on a side.”

He paused for effect, then continued.

“Eighteen metres. That’s five thousand years of digging, with
a whole planet to work on. Not very much, is it?

“Now, we all know how sought after this material is, not only for its intrinsic value, and its use as a store of wealth. Those new fusion plants that are coming online in Japan, and the others in development around the world: the gold-coated deuterium spheres that are central to their operation are going to open up an entirely new market for this material, with demands on purity and availability that have never been seen before. And what’s becoming obvious, is that over the next hundred years, land based mining will not be able to meet the demand. This —” he pointed to the image over his head “—will not be enough.

“So what are we to do? Well, it’s worth noting that mining operations to date have suffered a slight handicap. They’ve limited themselves to one third of the Earth’s surface: the land. The oceans and seabeds remain untapped. Until now.

“As you’ll probably be aware, this company is no stranger to extracting materials from deep marine environments. In fact it’s only in the last decade that technologies have been developed which allow us to start exploiting these resources while still remaining profitable, and I’m proud to say that this division of ESOS has been instrumental in perfecting some of these techniques. I won’t go into details, but the recent growth in our company has been entirely due to successes in this field.

“Seabed mining is only one approach, however. For this particular application, another opportunity presents itself: not what’s under the oceans, but what’s in them.”

By now Victor had stepped up to a raised dais at the foot of the screen and was gesturing at the images as he spoke. The video clips had been changing constantly and were currently fading between shots of rolling waves and wind-whipped seas.

“For as long as the oceans have existed, rivers have been flowing into them, bringing whatever materials they’ve picked up on the way. For almost as long, life has populated the seas and made its own contribution to the content and composition of the
waters. As a consequence, most of the fifty-eight elements that are widely used by industry today are held in solution in seawater in one form or another, sometimes in surprising amounts. Once you know how to extract them, there’s no need to go looking for the richest deposits, no need to laboriously dig them out. You can tap into this vast, chemical reservoir from anywhere. And that’s what we intend to do.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, consider this. The oceans of the world contain one ton of gold in every five cubic miles of seawater. They cover two thirds of the surface of the Earth, and at their deepest, they’re over seven miles deep. Think how much water that represents. Think how much gold is just sitting there for the taking. It exceeds that eighteen-metre cube by a factor of almost five hundred. In our view, extracting gold from the sea is the only viable option.

“This isn’t a new idea. However, though the idea is nothing new, putting it into practice is another matter. With conventional processing plants, the cost of extracting just one gram of gold far outweighs the price that gold could be sold on for. That’s why it’s still there now.

“But I want you to imagine something. Imagine you had a machine that could get at this gold, built so that its energy costs were zero. It could be solar powered, say, or it could run on tidal energy. And let’s keep this machine small, so that it’s easier to build. So, to be realistic, let’s say the rate of production was low, maybe a dollar’s worth of gold for every month of operation. That’s not much, but once you’ve paid for the machine, everything it produces is free.

“Now imagine that gold isn’t the only thing it’s taking out of the water. Imagine it taking iron, and copper, and silicon, in fact, whatever else you want it to take. Imagine then that it has some kind of manufacturing capability, so that while it’s processing the gold it can also be building something. Building, in fact, a copy of itself, identical in every way, including its ability to make
further copies. Where you had one machine, you would then have two, and if they continued the process, your automated workforce would double at every step.”

Victor paused as if to gauge their reactions, or maybe just to let the idea sink in. Max had plenty of questions, but he felt he should save them for the end. Safi, he saw, had been nodding intently all the way through and was still doing so in spite of the pause.

“This,” Victor continued, “this is what we have been working on for the last twelve months.”

And with a wave of his hand, it was as if the room transformed around them. The wall panels, no longer showing just the company logo, seemed to grow and merge into each other, taking on new depth and perspective as they did so. The floor, now down-projected from the ceiling, took on its own extra dimension, and even the table was included, the pseudo-stereo imagers using its upper surface as just another element of the scene being created around them, correcting for its shape and height so that the join was barely visible.